Science, Cognition and Consciousness is a broadly interdisciplinary program that provides intermediate undergraduate work in science (cognitive neuroscience ), social science (psychology) and the humanities (philosophy of science and mind). It contributes to the Evergreen’s General Education goals by offering students with academic goals in one of these areas an opportunity to do work in the others. In addition, it provides significant work involving quantitative reasoning in the statistics and research methods portions of the program.

The program contributes to the newly adopted expectations of an Evergreen Graduate in the following ways:

This program will examine the scope and limits of recent attempts to develop a new "science" of mind.

The program is especially suited for students interested in psychology (especially though not exclusively, cognitive psychology and cognitive or behavior neuroscience), neurobiology, philosophy, computer science and teaching. Students can earn upper division science credit for up to 40 of the 48 quarter hours offered through the program.

The program will contain the following interwoven threads:

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY / COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE –This component will examine a variety of questions concerning cognition in the light of specific cognitive and neuroscientific research results and problems in the area of attention, perception, memory, automatic processing, reasoning, and language as well as emotion. Material will be presented through lectures, labs, workshops and seminar discussion. Students will be assigned a cognitive neuroscience text as well as related readings on specific topics.

STATISTICS/DATA ANALYSIS/METHODS--This component will combine the study of research methods in psychology with an examination of the concepts and techniques of descriptive and inferential statistics, including multivariate statistics. The focus will be application rather than the mathematical foundations of statistics. It will emphasize the interpretation of statistical results in the context of experimental cognitive psychology. Data analysis will be fully integrated with statistics and with the use of the computer. Students will work with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) as well as with computer programs for cognitive data acquisition (e.g., response accuracy and reaction time). The component will be taught using a combination of lectures, problem review sessions, workshops and computer labs. This component will culminate in a group "mini-project" near the end of winter quarter that will involve research design, data collection, statistical data processing, data analysis and presentation of results. Students will use a statistics as well as a research design text.

SEMINAR--Seminar and related lectures will integrate the various elements of the program by addressing how the mind can be studied scientifically. It will explore questions such the nature of consciousness, the character of animal cognition, the relationship between the mind and the brain, the character and limitations of memory, and the extent to which logic and statistical methods mirror actual human reasoning. It will also consider the larger historical and philosophical issues surrounding current efforts to establish a science of mind, including the rise and fall of behaviorist methods in experimental psychology, the nature and extent of the "cognitive revolution" in psychology, as well as the impact of cognitive neuroscience on psychology. Spring quarter will examine the especially troublesome problem of accounting for language and consciousness in an appropriate science of mind.

PROJECTS: Each quarter there will be a group project. Fall quarter the project will originate in the cognitive neuroscience component of the program. The Winter quarter ("mini-project") will tie together statistics and cognitive research methods. In the Spring quarter, the bulk of program work will consist in an extensive, original project. It will typically involve collaboration in developing a research problem, generating a research design, getting human subjects review approval, carrying out data collection, conducting data analysis and presenting results. The aim is to actually conduct experimental scientific research although other types of research in cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, philosophy or related fields might be acceptable.

For each seminar students show think about question related to the week’s reading. Each week's seminar discussion proper will typically begin with seminar questions formulated by the faculty and posted on the web. After seminar, it will be your responsibility to prepare written answers to one of the questions as designated by faculty based on your reading and seminar discussion. Your answers should make specific reference to the text, exhibit your understanding of the reading, and reflect opinions of other students raised in seminar. In answering the questions you might also occasionally refer to other seminar books read earlier in the quarter if they have addressed issues raised by the question. Your answers should be prepared as "mini-essays," with complete sentences and paragraphs (not terse, telegraphic phrases), so that someone who was not familiar with the reading or who had not attended the discussion could understand them. Typically, therefore, your answers to each question will be about 2/3rds page in length, sometimes as long as two or three pages. They should be typed or word-processed, proofread and corrected. They should be completed and be in finished form before the next seminar. The responses will be collected weekly. After receiving response from their seminar faculty, students may elect to re-submit a revised version of their response to study questions in their program notebook, which will be due at the end of the quarter.

Fall Seminar Reading Schedule

Wk 1: Brief Handout on self-knowledge from Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves

Wk 2 Oliver Sacks, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat,

Wk 3:For Seminar, V.S. Ramachandran & Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain, Ch. 1-6

Wk 4: Ramachandran & Blakeslee, Second half, Ch. 7-12

Wk 6: Schacter, remainder of Search for Memory

Wk 8: LeDoux, Ch. 6-8, pp. 136-234

Wk 9: LeDoux, remainder

Wk 10: No new reading