Psychology

This course explores psycholinguistics and the psychology of language including current theories and recent research. It focuses on cognitive linguistics and English language learning.

This course focuses on the structure of the central nervous system, with particular reference to the morphological bases of clinical and functional neuroanatomy. The course discusses topics including the development of the nervous system; cells of the nervous system; the ventricular system and the liquoral system; the meninges; macroscopic anatomy of the spinal cord; functional anatomy of the spinal cord; spino-thalamic pathways; spino-cerebellar pathways; posterior column pathways; pyramidal pathway; extrapyramidal pathways; esopyramidal pathways; the brainstem; the cerebellum; the diencephalon; the telencephalon; functional anatomy of the telencephalon and of the limbic system; and the anatomical foundations of neurological and neuropathological conditions. The course requires basic knowledge of physiology, biology and biochemistry, and knowledge of cytology, histology, and general embryology as a prerequisite.

This is a course in Cognitive Neuroscience in which various disciplines (such as psychology, biology, physics, philosophy, medicine, and more) meet in a joint effort to understand the most remarkable mechanism in nature: the human brain. The first part of the course involves a brief historic overview on the methodology used to learn about brain functions and specializations with an emphasis on the novel methods characterizing neuroscience research. The remainder of the course sheds light on sensation and perception, namely the flow of information from the outside world into our inside world, and about behavior and motion, specifically the flow of information from the inside world back to the external environment. The course covers a wide variety of cognitive functions, from basic perception of color, touch, and sound, to higher functions such as object representation, emotion, and consciousness. In each part of the course, students explore neurological cases, experiments, and studies that have made great advances in the specific field with a special focus on how neuroscience research helped in significantly advancing the human brain is conceptualized. During the course, students gain an in-depth understanding of cutting-edge studies in neuroscience and deal with the most acute questions in the field, such as: How does the brain represent stimuli from the different senses? How can we efficiently act in our environment? How much can the brain change its functioning or even regain lost functionalities through our lifetime? The course also explores studies and information in order to separate knowledge from theory and propose questions for further scientific research.

In this course students receive an overview of the basic principles of connectionism and neural networks ranging from simple to complex models of neurons and their interconnections. Students learn how these models are used to study brain function for a wide range of topics including vision, decision making, and higher cognition. The course begins by identifying the brain, its structures, and their function. Also covered is the type of information processing carried out in the neural structures and what the physical and biological constrains are within those neural structures.