BCSC 275: Lecture Schedule

Only students who are enrolled in the course may access materials online. You must be logged into Blackboard to download these files.

The following schedule is tentative, depending on the amount of material covered in each class.

Date
Topic
Readings
Introduction and 'Pre-history' of cognitive science
 
Review syllabus
 
 
Bermúdez 1.0, 1.1, 1.3
Chomsky "Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior"
Early cognitive-scientific theories and results
 
Bermúdez 1.2, 1.4, 1.5
Miller "The magical number seven, plus or minus two"
 
Bermúdez 2.0-2.2
Shepard and Metzler "Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects"
Functional analysis and 'levels' of analysis
 
Bermúdez 2.3
Excerpt from Marr's (1982) Vision
 
Bermúdez 3.1, 3.2
Mishkin et al. "Object vision and spatial vision: two cortical pathways"
More functional analysis… and "The Integration Challenge" introduced
 
Bermúdez 3.4
Petersen et al. "Positron emission topographic studies"
 
Bermúdez 4.1- 4.3
Case study in the challenge of integration---Psychology of reasoning
 
Bermúdez 4.4, 4.5
Continuing local integrations – The BOLD signal
 
Bermúdez 4.5
 
 
Exam 1
 
Integration and intertheoretic reduction
 
Bermúdez 5.1-5.3
 
Modeling the mind as a 'symbol system'
 
Bermúdez 6.1
Newell and Simon "Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry"
The "language of thought" hypothesis and the "Chinese room" argument
 
Bermúdez 6.2
 
 
Bermúdez 6.3
Searle "Can Computers Think?"
Churchland and Churchland "Could a Machine Think?"
Connectionism: the mind as a neural network
 
Bermúdez 3.3, 8.1-8.2
 
 
Bermúdez 8.3-8.4
 
 
Review
 
 
Exam 2
 

Final exam TBD