The goal of cognitive science — and of this program — is to understand how your mind works. Trying to understand our own minds is perhaps the most ambitious and exciting (and difficult) project in all of science, and this project requires tools drawn from fields including experimental psychology, computer modeling and artificial intelligence, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and behavioral economics (among others).

This program will introduce you to several of the foundational tools and theories from these areas, as they relate to the study of the mind. We will employ these perspectives while exploring the nature of ... *you* — focusing on parts of you such as perception, attention, language, and decision-making. In sum, this program will expose you to cognitive science, the assumptions on which it rests, and several of the most important and fascinating discoveries that the field has made so far. By the end of our time together, you should have gained important new insights into what you are and how you work!