Essays
Each essay addresses a specific area of cognitive science and is written by an expert in that area. The essays address many of the fundamental issues that undergraduates should learn in an introductory course in cognitive science. The authors describe the basic issues and identify primary readings that should be covered in each specific area. Some essays also identify on-line resources that aid teaching. All essay documents are in PDF format. There is an option to leave comments following each essay and we hope you will share your thoughts about pedagogical approaches to these issues and identify basic issues that are not covered.
Teaching about Consciousness in Cognitive Science
This document relates approaches to teaching consciousness in the context of Cognitive Science.The content is organized around William Banks' Consciousness and Cognition seminar and helps prepare teachers to answer the challenging questions that today's students inevitably ask about conciousness.
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Teaching Artificial Intelligence in Introductory Cognitive Science Courses
At the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science is the question "What is intelligence?" The answer to this question has great impact on the philosophical questions in AI: "Can machines think?" and "Can machines feel?" This document outlines how to approach these questions in teaching.
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Language Acquisition
This document explores alternative explanations for the course of childrens language development. The different perspectives can be traced back to the Nature vs. Nurture debate about how knowledge is acquired in any cognitive domain.
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Teaching Reasoning and Decision Making in Introductory Cognitive Science Courses
The subjects of reasoning and decision making provide a means of exploring a number of issues central to the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. Among these are: formal systems, rational versus intuitive thinking, the nature of intelligence and educational impacts on cognition, to name a few. This document presents some suggested topics, readings and activities for use in teaching these subjects.
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Representations
Cognitive Science is all about representations. The mind/brain constructs mental models of the external world, representing some aspects of the environment while leaving other features out. One way to understand a concept is to trivialize it, and this is the approach that this document takes with "representation."
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Teaching about Bilingualism in Introductory Cognitive Science Courses
Until recently, research on language and its cognitive interface focused almost exclusively on monolingual speakers of a single language and typically speakers of English as the native language. This essay discusses how new research investigates the way in which bilinguals negotiate the presence of two languages in a single mind and outlines core bilingualism topics that might be included in an introductory cognitive science or psychology of language course.
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Cognitive Neuroscience of Language
The issue of how the brain forms the basis for acquiring and processing language is central to cognitive science. This essay addresses how neural mechanisms instantiate knowledge of language, considering how sounds, words and sentences are computed at a neural level and the methodological challenges facing research on the neural basis of language.
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