Cognitive Science 200 is an interdisciplinary seminar of changing topics, and is used as a mechanism for Ph.D. students in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program and in the Cognitive Science Department to achieve breadth.  This quarter, the topic is hemispheric asymmetries in the brain. We are using Ivry and Robertson's book, "The Two Sides of Perception," as a way to organize our thinking around this topic. The goal of the course is to learn more about the functional differences between the hemispheres, how they specialize, what the causes of these differences may be. Ivry & Robertson's book proposes a particular theory of hemispheric processing, the Double Filtering by Frequency (DFF) theory. We will have speakers that are supportive and critical of the hypothesis, some with hypotheses (and models!) of their own. One of the authors of the book, Lynn Robertson will speak on October 23rd. This is a confusing area, and we hope that this quarter will shed some light on it!

The room for Cogsci 200 is Cognitive Science Building 180.  The meeting times are 2-2:50PM for registered students, and 3:00-4:30PM for the lectures (to which the UCSD Cognitive Science community is invited). This will be followed by a wine & cheese from 4:30-5:30, sponsored by me (Gary Cottrell). The first meeting is Monday, September 25th and the last meeting will be November 27, 2006.

The graduate student section from 2-2:50 will involve the professor using the dreaded index card method: students will be asked questions about the papers that are intended to generate some discussion and understanding of the material. Students are therefore expected to have done the reading before class. The method involves index cards with every student's name on them. These are shuffled at the beginning of class, and then students are asked questions in order of their appearance on the card. The first question is almost always, "What is the point of this paper?", and is often asked several times until we converge on one or more main themes of the paper.

The requirements for the class are: 1) reading the assigned papers; 2) being able to answer questions about them in discussion section; 3) asking the speaker a question about 20% of the time (I'll be keeping track! I.e., you need to ask 2 questions all quarter) and 4) writing an approximately 10 page paper on some topic of interest from the course, that could be critical of the hemispheric asymmetry hypotheses put forward during the course, in favor of them, etc. Or, you could write a proposal for a research project on the subject of the seminar. It should be specific enough that there are clear criteria for success or failure. It should certainly address the issue of hemispheric asymmetry.
 
 

DATE	PRESENTER	PAPER	SLIDES
September 25th	Janet Hsiao, UCSD	Chapter 1 of TTSOP and other sources	Janet's slides
October 2	David Peterzell, UCSD	Sergent, J. (1982) The cerebral balance of power: Confrontation or cooperation? JEP:HPP 8(2):253-272 Peterzell,D.H. and Harvery, L.O. (1989) Spatial frequencies and the cerebral hemispheres: Contrast sensitivity, visible persistence, and letter classification Perception & Psychophysics 46(5):443-455 Chapter 2 of TTSOP David's Challenge to I&R	David's slides
October 9	Seana Coulson, UCSD	Seana Coulson and Ying Choon Wu (2005) Right Hemisphere Activation of Joke-related Information: An Event-related Brain Potential Study J. Cog. Neuro 17(3):494-506 Coulson, S. & Williams, R.F. (2004) Hemispheric asymmetries and joke comprehension Neuropsychologia43128-141 Chapter 2 of TTSOP (again!)	Seana's slides
October 16	Janet Hsiao, UCSD	Hsiao, J. and Shillcock, R. (2005) Differences in split and nonsplit architectures emerge from modelling Chinese character pronunciation Proceedings of the 2005 Cognitive Science Society Meeting989-994 Hsiao, J. and Shillcock, R. (2006) Hemispheric differences emerge from perceptual learning: Evidence from modeling Chinese character pronunciation. Proceedings of the 2006 Cognitive Science Society Meeting Chapter 7 of TTSOP.	Janet's slides
October 23	Lynn Roberston, UC Berkeley	Chapter 3 of TTSOP Lynn and Rich's response to David's Challenge	Lynn's slides
October 30	Gary Cottrell	Dailey, Matthew N. and Cottrell, Garrison W. (1999) Organization of Face and Object Recognition in Modular Neural Networks. Neural Networks 12(7-8):1053-1074. Chapter 3 of TTSOP (again, since many people missed it) You should also look at Chapter 7 again for comparison	Gary's slides
November 6	Karen Emmorey, SDSU	Emmorey, Karen (2002) Sign Language in the Brain. In Emmorey, Karen, Language, Cognition, and the Brain: Insights from Sign Language Research. LEA:Mahwah Chapter 6 of TTSOP	Karen's slides
November 13	Chuansheng Chen, UC Irvine	Chuansheng Chen, Gui Xue, Qi Dong, Zhen Jin, Tian Li, Feng Xue, Libo Zhao and Yi Guo (in press) Sex determines the neurofunctional predictors of visual word learning. To appear in Neuropsychologia Chapter 6 of TTSOP again!	Chuansheng's slides
November 20	Mark Jung-Beeman, Northwestern	Required reading: Mark Jung-Beeman (2005) Bilateral brain processes for comprehending natural language TICS 9(11):512-518 Virtue, Sandra, Haberman, Jason, Clancy, Zoe, Parrish, Todd and Mark Jung Beeman (2006) Neural activity of inferences during story comprehension. Brain Research 1084:104-114 Supplementary reading: Mark Jung-Beeman, Edward M. Bowden, Jason Haberman, Jennifer L. Frymiare, Stella Arambel-Liu, Richard Greenblatt, Paul J. Reber and John Kounios (2004) Neural Activity When People Solve Verbal Problems with Insight PLoS BIOLOGY 2(4):500-510. John Kounios, Jennifer L. Frymiare, Edward M. Bowden, Jessica I. Fleck, Karuna Subramaniam, Todd B. Parrish, and Mark Jung-Beeman (2006) The Prepared Mind: Neural Activity Prior to Problem Presentation Predicts Subsequent Solution by Sudden Insight. Psych Science 17(10):882-890.	Mark's slides
November 27	Eran Zaidel, UCLA	Weekes, N.Y.,Carusi, D., & E. Zaidel (1997) Interhemispheric relations in hierarchical perception: A second look. Neuropsychologia 35(1):37-44. Chapter 4 of TTSOP For a feeling of accomplishment, you can read the remaining parts of the book we missed!

The instructor is Professor Gary Cottrell, whose office is CSE Building room 4130.  Feel free to send email to arrange an appointment, or telephone (858) 534-6640.
 
 

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Most recently updated on September 25, 2006 by Gary Cottrell, gary@ucsd.edu