Co-taught with Larry Jacoby
In this course we introduce students to the many aspects of memory and the many effects of its workings on individual and social life. Topics include individual memory systems, episodic and semantic memory, working memory, memory systems in the brain, amnesia, memory and self, autobiographical memory, historical events and personal memories, remembered events and the construction of collective identity, processes of knowledge transmission.
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Collective Memory.
Offered every Fall semester.
Examines the influence of evolved cognitive dispositions (the way natural selection engineered the human mind) on the transmission of cultural knowledge. Dispositions present from early childhood make certain kinds of cultural knowledge particularly easy to acquire and therefore culturally stable. We also consider the evidence for differences in cognitive processes triggered by different social environments. Emphasis is on empirical studies and experimental methods in the study of cultural similarity and differences.
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Offered Spring 2005.
This course is about how people create and remember their personal life histories. The topics include basic research issues in autobiographical memory, as well as theoretical and practical aspects of the subject.
We will briefly describe the classical Piagetian paradigm in cognitive development, but mainly focus on recent experimental findings and theories in a variety of domains of cognitive development: how children acquire number concepts, how they develop intuitions about animacy and agency, how they develop mind-reading (aka "Theory of Mind"), whether development requires strong prior biases, whether it requires general association algorithms or on the contrary specialised principles. Emphasis is on experimental findings.