• Demonstrate knowledge of the fundamental methods associated with different approaches to understanding the human mind/brain, including philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and connectionist neural networks.
• Demonstrate knowledge of theories, models, and empirical findings relating to cognitive faculties such as perception, attention, memory, language, executive functions, emotion, and consciousness.
• Provide illustrative examples of how the research in cognitive science potentially illuminates our understanding of human communication.
• Analyse relevant theories, models, and empirical findings in a coherent and critical way, while observing academic conventions regarding the presentation of arguments and the use of references.

This elective course is intended as both an introduction to the field of cognitive science in general, and an introduction to how cognitive science potentially illuminates our understanding of human communication. In the course, cognitive science will be defined as an interdisciplinary approach to the systematic study of mind, brain, and behaviour; a field that incorporates a variety of academic disciplines including philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and connectionist neural networks. Communication, on the other hand, will be broadly defined as the act of transferring information from a sender to a receiver through the use of some sort of physical medium. The course will relate cognition and communication in various ways: cognitive science will be seen as providing an explanation for how communication is possible, while communication studies will be seen as providing a concrete and practical example of cognition operating in an everyday setting.
  
In the first part of the course, a number of basic distinctions will be introduced. For example, there are two basic approaches to investigating cognitive phenomena – theoretical and empirical – and two basic levels of explanation: the functional level describes the ‘software’ of the mind (its systems and processes), while the neurobiological level describes the ‘hardware’ of the brain (the neural structures which underpin those systems and processes).The fundamental methods associated with different approaches to understanding the human mind/brain will be discussed.

The second (and main) part of the course will give an overview of the theories, models, and empirical findings relating to various cognitive faculties: namely, perception, attention, memory, language, executive functions, emotion, and consciousness. Additional topics will include evolutionary theory (how cognitive mechanisms evolved to cope with the environment of our hunter-gatherer ancestors), and theories of embodied and embedded cognition (how cognition potentially involves an interaction between the brain, the body, and the world).
  
The third and final part of the course will attempt to summarise how cognitive science potentially illuminates our understanding of human communication. This summary will consider the fundamental distinction between symbolic communication (e.g., language) and analogical communication (e.g., visual media; facial and bodily expressions). It will also consider the various theories of how information is transmitted from a sender to a receiver, or alternatively, how the information transmitted by the sender is processed by the receiver (e.g., semiotic-code models versus cognitive-constructivist models).

This elective course references and partially overlaps with the proposed elective course ‘Visual Communication’ (BA-DB_IBC).

 

Primary reading
 
Eysenck, M. W., & Keane, M. T. (2010). Cognitive psychology: A student’s handbook (6th Ed.). Hove: Psychology Press.
 
 
Secondary reading: Approaches to human cognition
 
Churchland, P. (2002). Brain-wise: Studies in neurophilosophy, Chapter 1, pp. 1-34. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 
 
Secondary reading: Visual perception and attention
 
Peissig, J. J., & Tarr, M. J. (2007). Visual object recognition: Do we know more now than we did 20 years ago? Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 75-96.
 
McKone, E., Kanwisher, N., & Duchaine, B. C. (2007). Can generic expertise explain special processing for faces? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 8-15.
 
Bundesen, C., Habekost, T., & Kyllingsbæk, S. (2011). A neural theory of visual attention and short-term memory (NTVA). Neuropsychologia, 49, 1446-1457.
 
Rensink, R. A. (2002). Change detection. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 245-277.
 
 
Secondary reading: Memory
 
Baddeley, A. (2003). Working memory: Looking back and looking forward. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 829-839.
 
Patterson, K., Nestor, P. J., & Rogers, T. T. (2007). Where do you know what you know? The representation of semantic knowledge in the human brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, 976-988.
 
Loftus, E. F. (2003). Make-believe memories. American Psychologist, 58, 867-873.
 
 
Secondary reading: Executive functions
 
Anderson, J. R., Fincham, J. M., Qin, Y., & Stocco, A. (2008). A central circuit of the mind. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 136-143.
 
Todd, P. M., & Gigerenzer, G. (2007). Environments that make us smart: Ecological rationality. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 167-171.
 
Evans, J. St. B. T. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 255-278.
 
 
Secondary reading: Emotion
 
Frijda, N. H. (1988). The laws of emotion. American Psychologist, 43, 349-358.
 
Phelps, E. A. (2006). Emotion and cognition: Insights from studies of the amygdala. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 27-53.
 
 
Secondary reading: Consciousness
 
Baars, B. J., & Franklin, S. (2007). An architectural model of conscious and unconscious brain functions: Global Workspace Theory and IDA. Neural Networks, 20, 955-961.
 
Block, N. (2005). Two neural correlates of consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 46-52.