The course of Introduction to Cognitive Sciences is part of the program in Communication Studies (Bachelor’s degree course) and it is included among the complementary training activities. The main goal of this course is to introduce students into basic concepts, the basic methods and the main researches in the field of cognitive science. Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology.
After completing the course of Introduction to Cognitive Science the student should:
- know the diversity of viewpoints, the controversies and the areas of nascent consensus in the field of cognitive science;
- appreciate the contribution of each of the constituent disciplines;
- know multiple definitions of the foundational concepts of computation and representation and be able to discuss them from multiple points of view;
- have an overview of how perception, memory, language, motor control, and so forth come together to produce behavior.
After completing the course of Introduction to Cognitive Science the student should:
- know the diversity of viewpoints, the controversies and the areas of nascent consensus in the field of cognitive science;
- appreciate the contribution of each of the constituent disciplines;
- know multiple definitions of the foundational concepts of computation and representation and be able to discuss them from multiple points of view;
- have an overview of how perception, memory, language, motor control, and so forth come together to produce behavior.
teacher profile teaching materials
S. Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts, Viking Press, New York 2014.
Programme
This course will provide an introduction to cognitive science by exploring some topics of research in this multidisciplinary field. Cognitive science is the study of cognition as information processing by complex organisms or artificial systems; thus it is not a discipline, but rather a “doctrine” that has oriented and is orienting inquiries in a number of disciplines — some descriptive and empirical (e.g., cognitive psychology, linguistics and, more recently, neuroscience), some speculative and foundational (e.g., philosophy of mind), and some both speculative and applied (e.g., artificial intelligence and robotics).Core Documentation
J.L. Bermúdez, Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of the Mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2020.S. Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts, Viking Press, New York 2014.
Type of evaluation
Verification of learning takes place through a multiple choice test.