This course brings together scholarship from musicologists, cognitive scientists, and biologists to explore the concept of "animal music" from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Animal music is an important topic because it harbors profound information about the history of life--by examining it in relation to human music making, we stand to gain a better understanding of everything from social synchronization and linguistic turn-taking to (bio)semiotics and cultural evolution. Using a combination of short lectures, student presentations, and creative projects, this course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the field.

Attitudes matter. Throughout the history of the world, people have taken extraordinary steps to support a set of attitudes and beliefs that helped to bring about a better world. Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King led societies to new views of human dignity by their written words and their behaviors. Every day, people advocate for their ideals. They persuade and organize in the service of bringing about a world that is closer to the paragon in which they believe.

The objective of this course is to provide advanced students in cognitive science, psychology, and computer science with the skills to develop computational models of human cognition. Computational modeling is one of the central methods in cognitive science research, and can help to provide insight into how people solve the challenging problems posed by everyday life, as well as how to bring computers closer to human performance for some of these problems. The course will explore three ways in which researchers have attempted to normalize cognition: symbolic approaches, neural networks, and probability and statistics.

Babies, who look like helpless blobs, are capable of impressive feats of learning. 3-year-olds, who can't cross the street alone, know an astounding amount of information about their environments. We will focus on landmark studies that elucidate how children's biology, cognition, language, and social experiences interact to set the stage for what we do and who we are. Is the baby's world a 'blooming, buzzing confusion', or do babies enter the world prepared to make sense of their environments? How can we understand the collaboration between nature and nurture during development?

Principles of psychology relevant to the theory and practice of education. Through readings, discussion, and classroom observations, students study theories of development, learning, cognition (including literacy), and motivation, as well as relevant individual and group differences; assessment; and the social psychology of the classroom. The course focuses on two main topics: 1) how learning at multiple school levels is influenced by one's own characteristics, experiences, and various learning contexts; and 2) how the practice of teaching is, in fact, a clinical practice and what that means for educators, students, schools and society.