Conference Assignment

Every member of the lecture will give a short (10 to 15 minute) presentation during group conference on a topic of their choice. The written work is due on the same day as the presentation. This written work will be an annotated outline of the talk to be posted on your group conference webboard. The outline should include links to relevant web materials and an annotated bibliography of sources.

The range of topics is wide: anything that involves study of the brain, the mind, learning, memory, perception, language.

The following sites are good portals for mind and brain news:
Human Nature Daily Review
New Scientist: Human Nature Section
Brain Briefings
Psyche Archive B
Science Week

The library electronic databases that are most relevant for this assignment are:
Ebscohost This is a good place to begin. Lots of newspaper and magazine articles are carried in this database in addition to many neuroscience journals.
PsycInfo which allows you to search most of the psychological journals for citations and abstracts. We may not have the journals cited. To find out if we have an electronic version of the journal use the library journal locator. Select the first letter of the journal you're searching for, then use Edit->Find in Page to locate the journal title.
PsycARTICLES - a full text database of the American Psychological Association Journals from 1988 onwards.

To include hyperlinks in a webboard posting simply type in the URL of the site and it will be turned into a link automatically. To include images in a webboard posting simply type in the URL for the image and it will appear in the body of your posting.

I have put together an example of the kind of thing I'm looking for and it will be available on the group conference WebBoards.

Class Papers

You will write two class papers of no more than 7 pages each. The first is due in lecture on October 5th and the second is due in lecture on November 23rd.

Revision [11.12.04]: Instead of the second class paper prepare an annotated bibliography of further reading material for one of the lecture topics. I have put together an example of the type of document I mean: annotated bibliography for the animal language lecture. Post a copy onto your group conference WebBoard and give me a printed version. Due on 12.7.04.

For the first paper select one or two of the following questions:

1. What is problematic about Descartes' mind-body dualism? Can we escape it?
2. Can we know anything about what it is like to be a bat?
3. What can we learn from brain imaging techniques? What are the difficulties in interpreting such studies?
4. Do modern studies of brain localization escape the conceptual confusions of phrenology?
5. Why have views of adult brain plasticity changed so radically in recent years?
6. Select any recent article that is related to the topics of this course and describe the study and its implications.

For the second paper select one or two of the following questions:

1. Detail every aspect of memory you would need to include in a memory prothesis or transplant for an amnesic patient.
2. What has been learned from the case of H.M.?
3. What does Patricia Hampl mean by "There may be no more pressing intellectual need in our culture than for people to become sophisticated about the function of memory." (in "I Could Tell You Stories", 1999).
4. How does human memory differ from a video recorder?
5. Why do we remember so little of the earliest phase of our childhood?
6. Upon reviewing the literature on children's testimony Ceci & Bruck (discussed in Schacter, Chapter 4) state that young children are often more suggestible and prone to distortion than older children and adults, but under the right circumstances they can accurately recall many aspects of their past experiences. What are the right circumstances?
7. What is a "flashbulb memory"? Why is this notion problematic? Why is it intuitively appealing?
8. Expand Daniel Schacter's statement: "We need to recognize that memories do not exist in one of two states - either true or false...". Do you agree?
9. Why does paleontology provide a compelling metaphor for constructive memory?
10. Can apes be taught a human language?
11.Why is accent one of the most difficult things to perfect in learning a foreign language?
12.What can we learn about the mental lexicon from slips of the tongue? Collect and analyse your own samples of slips, if the opportunity arises.
13.What have we learned about brain representation of language from studies of aphasia?
14.Why is the intuitively appealing "imitation-reinforcement" theory of children's language acquisition now untenable?
15.Assess the evidence for a "critical period" in language acquisition.
16. What misconceptions about the nature of language are revealed by a consideration of the history of Deaf education?
17. How do signed and spoken languages differ?
18. Why is there no such thing as a "primitive" language?
19. Select any recent article that is related to the topics of this course and describe the study and its implications.