Assignments

 

Questions for Final Exam

Midterm Questions

Group Conference Assignment

The group conferences for this lecture will be in the "journal club" format. Each member of the lecture will produce one 10-15 minute presentation on a mind/brain topic that has been featured in recent science news. The range of topics is wide: anything that involves study of the brain, the mind, learning, memory, perception, language, emotions and/or consciousness. The first step is to locate a news report of a recent finding in newspapers, magazines or web sites such as The New York Times, New Scientist, Scientific American, or NPR. Post the URL for the source onto your group blog for the other members of the group conference to read before class. Research the article by reading the original journal report, and other background materials. In other words, recover the story behind the news story. Prepare an outline with links and images and post it onto your group WebBoard. The members of the group conference who are not presenting that week will post a discussion question in response to each news story. The written paper expanding on your presentation will be due one week later.

The following sites are good portals for mind and brain news:
Discover Magazine Mind & Brain News
Human Nature Daily Review
New Scientist: Human Nature Section
Brain Briefings

Science Week

Blogs are a great new source, and there are so many. Here's a few that have caught my attention:

Cognitive Daily
A collaboration between Davidson College Psychology professor Greta Munger and her writer husband Dave that offers intelligent commentary on a new cognitive study 'nearly' every day.

The Frontal Cortex
Written by Jonah Lehrer, author of the excellent but oddly titled book, Proust was a Neuroscientist.

Neurocritic
The description of this blog reads, 'Deconstructing the most sensationalistic recent findings in Human Brain Imaging, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Psychopharmacology'.

Scienceblogs Brain and Behavior Channel
A good umbrella site that organizes posts from many blogs, including most of the ones listed above.

The library electronic databases that are most relevant for this assignment are:

ScienceDirect This database has many neuroscience journals, such as Neuropsychologia, Neuron, etc.
Ebscohost 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.
PsycARTICLES - a full text database of the American Psychological Association Journals from 1988 onwards.

Google Scholar can also be a good way of locating the research article, and don't forget the personal web sites of individual researchers which often have pdfs of their recent papers freely available.