Updated syllabus not available at time of Web Update. Please use this as a rough guide for 2003 course, and check back soon for new version.
Updated syllabus not available at time of Web Update. Please use this as a rough guide for 2003 course, and check back soon for new version.
The seminar in animal cognition will cover selected topics in
nonverbal representational structures. Students will be expected
to present one topic area verbally and write up their presentation
as a short term paper. There are no examinations and no other
requirements beyond participation in class meetings. A text as
such will not be used, but a variety of readings will be assigned
for each topic area. Resource books which will be used extensively
are:
Several secondary sources will be used as well. These will be
placed on reserve in the library as will the two major resource
books above. One secondary source that will be used fairly frequently
is: Ristau, C.A., Ed. (1991), Cognitive Ethology: The Minds
of Other Animals. Essays in Honor of Donald R. Griffin. Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Students are expected to meet with the instructor during the
first two or three weeks to decide upon a topic area and appropriate
readings for their presentations.
| Date | Topic | Readings |
| Jan. 22, 1997 | Organizational Meeting | No reading assignments |
| Jan. 29 | No meeting: reading period. | Gallistel, Chaps. 1 and
2, Griffin, Chapter 1 |
| Feb. 5 | Individual meetings | No additional reading |
| Feb. 12 | ||
| Feb. 19 | ||
| Feb. 26 | ||
| Mar. 5 | ||
| Mar. 12 | ||
| Mar. 19 | Spring break | no class |
| Mar. 26 | ||
| Apr. 2 | ||
| Apr. 9 | ||
| Apr. 16 | ||
| Apr. 23 | ||
| Apr. 30 | ||
| May 7 |
Additional lecture times will be planned according to student interests, faculty availability, and the scheduling of student talks.
| Cognition and evolution | Representation and memory: Attribute representation: time, space, order, number (subitizing) |
| Cognitive mechanisms in Behavioral Ecology: Foraging, caching, navigation/maps, tool use, risk sensitivity |
Associative structures (blocking, attention, causation) |
| Kin recognition | Altruism/Cooperation |
| Evolution of cognition (comparative cognition) | Imitation |
| Self Awareness | Deception |
| Conceptual categorization | Reasoning |
| Communication and language | Decision mechanisms (choice, matching) |
| Directed forgetting (conditioned discrimination) | Neurobiological substrates of all the above |
| Mathematical models of all the above | Other relevant topic with instructor approval
|