University College London

This course explores how humans represent, comprehend, and produce language. Students examine core properties of mental representations and processes involved in understanding language, and how linguistic processes unfold in real time. Topics ranging from speech perception and word recognition to sentence and discourse comprehension. Students learn the basics of experimental design and core experimental techniques.

This course traces the development of western political thought from its classical origins to its most important modern formulations, exploring the main European traditions of inquiry concerning the nature and status of political society, the state, law, citizenship, and relations of power. It extends from Greek antiquity to the early 20th century, and emphasis is placed on the writings of major thinkers and their contemporary historical contexts, including Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Alfarabi, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Franz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, and John Rawls.

In the social sciences, we try to understand the behavior of individuals in collective settings. In such settings, the best course of action for the individual often depends on the actions of others. For example, the decision to dress formally or informally for a dinner party depends on how we think others will be dressing. Game theory is the formal analysis of decision making in such interdependent situations in which an individual’s best course of action depends on the actions of others. This course presents a non-technical introduction to non-cooperative game theory.

Behavior is the front-line interaction of organisms with their environment, allowing them to respond rapidly to changes in the environment that define the Anthropocene. Determining the mechanisms of such behavioral responses and how they evolved is fundamental for understanding how organisms adjust to their changing environment. Behavioral ecology examines these responses in the context of the natural environment, bringing the study of behavioral ecology center stage in environmental research. This course unites the classical study of animal behavior, using Niko Tinbergen’s four ‘whys’ of behavior as a framework, with theory on the role of phenotypic plasticity in changing environments. An understanding of the function and mechanisms of animal behavior is timely in coping with current social, economic, and environmental problems in our changing planet.