This course provides students an opportunity to explore their choice of topic in cognitive science in depth while honing their science communication skills and broadly surveying the foundations of cognitive science. The course aims to expose students to a variety of cognitive models (e.g., connectionist, Bayesian, quantum models) and to discuss and evaluate competing models for similar problems. Students will be expected to present and critique classic and recent research articles from the cognitive modelling literature, chosen from a list provided by the instructor.

On completion of this course, the student will be able to:

• Demonstrate understanding of a range of classic and current articles in cognitive science/modelling by summarizing and critiquing their central ideas and/or results.
• Demonstrate understanding of the relationship between computational models and cognitive theories, by being able to critically assess the theoretical adequacy of a given model.
• Compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of different models of the same behaviour.
• Search the literature and synthesize information from several papers on the same topic and create a coherent oral presentation on that topic.
• Communicate (written and oral) key findings in cognitive science/modelling to inter-disciplinary audiences.