Courses tagged with "Interest and debt" (74)
This seminar focuses on the cognitive science of moral reasoning. Philosophers debate how we decide which moral actions are permissible. Is it permissible to take one human life in order to save others? We have powerful and surprisingly rich and subtle intuitions to such questions.
In this class, you will learn how intuitions can be studied using formal analytical paradigms and behavioral experiments. Thursday evening, meet to learn about recent advances in theories of moral reasoning. Overnight, formulate a hypothesis about the structure of moral reasoning and design a questionnaire-based experiment to test this. Friday, present and select 1-2 proposals and collect data; we will then reconvene to analyze and discuss results and implications for the structure of the moral mind.
This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.
The course focuses on the problem of supervised learning within the framework of Statistical Learning Theory. It starts with a review of classical statistical techniques, including Regularization Theory in RKHS for multivariate function approximation from sparse data. Next, VC theory is discussed in detail and used to justify classification and regression techniques such as Regularization Networks and Support Vector Machines. Selected topics such as boosting, feature selection and multiclass classification will complete the theory part of the course. During the course we will examine applications of several learning techniques in areas such as computer vision, computer graphics, database search and time-series analysis and prediction. We will briefly discuss implications of learning theories for how the brain may learn from experience, focusing on the neurobiology of object recognition. We plan to emphasize hands-on applications and exercises, paralleling the rapidly increasing practical uses of the techniques described in the subject.
This course highlights the interplay between cellular and molecular storage mechanisms and the cognitive neuroscience of memory, with an emphasis on human and animal models of hippocampal mechanisms and function. Class sessions include lectures and discussion of papers.
Surveys general principles and specific examples of motor control in biological systems. Emphasizes the neural mechanisms underlying different aspects of movement and movement planning. Covers sensory reception, reflex arcs, spinal cord organization, pattern generators, muscle function, locomotion, eye movement, and cognitive aspects of motor control. Functions of central motor structures including cerebellum, basal ganglia, and cerebral cortex considered. Cortical plasticity, motor learning and computational approaches to motor control, and motor disorders are discussed.
Roles of neural plasticity in learning and memory and in development of invertebrates and mammals. An in-depth critical analysis of current literature of molecular, cellular, genetic, electrophysiological, and behavioral studies. Discussion of original papers supplemented by introductory lectures.
Lectures and discussions in this course cover the clinical, behavioral, and molecular aspects of the brain aging processes in humans. Topics include the loss of memory and other cognitive abilities in normal aging, as well as neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Discussions based on readings taken from primary literature explore the current research in this field.
The neuropharmacology course will discuss the drug-induced changes in functioning of the nervous system. The specific focus of this course will be to provide a description of the cellular and molecular actions of drugs on synaptic transmission. This course will also refer to specific diseases of the nervous system and their treatment in addition to giving an overview of the techniques used for the study of neuropharmacology.
This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.
Provides a comprehensive introduction to key issues and findings in object recognition in experimental, neural, computational, and applied domains. Emphasizes the problem of representation, exploring the issue of how 3-D objects should be encoded so as to efficiently recognize them from 2-D images. Second half focuses on face recognition, an ecologically important instance of the general object recognition problem. Describes experimental studies of human face recognition performance and recent attempts to mimic this ability in artificial computational systems.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic, progressive, degenerative disease of the brain that produces movement disorders and deficits in executive functions, working memory, visuospatial functions, and internal control of attention. It is named after James Parkinson (1755-1824), the English neurologist who described the first case.
This six-week summer workshop explored different aspects of PD, including clinical characteristics, structural neuroimaging, neuropathology, genetics, and cognitive function (mental status, cognitive control processes, working memory, and long-term declarative memory). The workshop did not take up the topics of motor control, nondeclarative memory, or treatment.
The applications of pattern recognition techniques to problems of machine vision is the main focus for this course. Topics covered include, an overview of problems of machine vision and pattern classification, image formation and processing, feature extraction from images, biological object recognition, bayesian decision theory, and clustering.
Probability theory captures a number of essential characteristics of human cognition, including aspects of perception, reasoning, belief revision, and learning. Expressions of degree of belief were used in language long before people began codifying the laws of probability theory. This course explores the history and debates over codifying the laws of probability, how probability theory applies to specific cognitive processes, how it relates to the human understanding of causality, and how new computational approaches to causal modeling provide a framework for understanding human probabilistic reasoning.
This class is suitable for advanced undergraduates or graduate students specializing in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and related fields.
In this course, we will look at the properties behind the basic concepts of probability and statistics and focus on applications of statistical knowledge. We will learn how statistics and probability work together. The subject of statistics involves the study of methods for collecting, summarizing, and interpreting data. Statistics formalizes the process of making decisionsand this course is designed to help you cultivate statistic literacy so that you can use this knowledge to make better decisions. Note that this course has applications in sciences, economics, computer science, finance, psychology, sociology, criminology, and many other fields. Every day, we read articles and reports in print or online. After finishing this course, you should be comfortable asking yourself whether the articles make sense. You will be able to extract information from the articles and display that information effectively. You will also be able to understand the basics of how to draw statistical conclusions.
This course will introduce you to the major concepts of and debates surrounding industrial and organizational psychology. Industrial and organizational psychology is the application of psychological research and theory to human interaction (both with other humans and with human factors, or machines and computers) in the workplace. The phrase “industrial and organizational psychology” (sometimes referred to as “I/O”) may be somewhat misleading, as the field deals less with actual organizations and/or industries and more with the people in these areas. As mentioned above, “I/O” is an applied psychological science, which means that it takes research findings and theories that may have originally been used to explain a general phenomenon of human behavior and applies them to human behavior in a specific setting (here, the workplace). Consider, for example, the fact that many jobs require applicants to take a personality test. Psychologists originally developed this test to detect and diagnose abnorm…
This course introduces learners to the principles of learning and behavior by surveying relevant theoretical and empirical approaches within psychology. The overall emphasis is on the theoretical foundations of psychology as they relate to human learning and behavior. The following topics will be reviewed: historical perspectives of early learning theories, prevailing theories of human development, classical and operant conditioning, effects stimuli have on learning and behavior, social learning, motivation, cognitive developmental theory in the context of learning stages and processes, memory and human information processing models, and problem-solving methods. Understanding these human processes is an integral part of psychology and other domains of human behavior, such as marketing, sports, health, education and relationships. Learning theories are an outgrowth from philosophies of thought. The philosophical approaches of rationalism and empiricism, and the works of Plato and Descarte form the…
This course will introduce you to the psychology behind gender and sexuality, or the study of the different ways our gender roles and sexual identities impact our lives. Although the terms “gender” and “sex” are often used synonymously in everyday speech, this course will assign the terms two different meanings. “Sex” refers to biological differencei.e. whether you are a female or male from a biological standpoint. “Gender” refers to the social and psychological attributes that come along with one’s sex. Though these terms are similar and relate to one another, there is a distinct difference between the two that you should recognize for the purposes of this course. In this course, we will take a look at how our understanding of our own gender and sex can affect different aspects of our functioning, while also identifying the factors in our lives that can impact our gender and sex. While we often assume we know a lot about how gender affects our lives and the lives of the opposite gender, t…
This course covers central topics in language processing, including: the structure of language; sentence, discourse, and morphological processing; storage and access of words in the mental dictionary; speech processing; the relationship between the computational resources available in working memory and the language processing mechanism; and ambiguity resolution. The course also considers computational modeling, including connectionist models; the relationship between language and thought; and issues in language acquisition including critical period phenomena, the acquisition of speech, and the acquisition of words. Experimental methodologies such as self-paced reading, eye-tracking, cross-modal priming, and neural imaging methods are also examined.
We will examine current research and theory regarding the validity and utility of commonly accepted gender differences in many realms. Topics include: gender differences in cognitive abilities; the social construction of gender; developmental, family, educational and medical influences; and political and economic forces.
To provide instruction and dialog on practical ethical issues relating to the responsible conduct of human and animal research in the brain and cognitive sciences. Specific emphasis will be placed on topics relevant to young researchers including data handling, animal and human subjects, misconduct, mentoring, intellectual property, and publication.
This series of research talks by members of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences introduces students to different approaches to the study of the brain and mind.
Topics include:
- From Neurons to Neural Networks
- Prefrontal Cortex and the Neural Basis of Cognitive Control
- Hippocampal Memory Formation and the Role of Sleep
- The Formation of Internal Modes for Learning Motor Skills
- Look and See: How the Brain Selects Objects and Directs the Eyes
- How the Brain Wires Itself
