The syllabus covers the following topics. They are listed separately here, but in some cases they will be presented in an interleaved fashion:
1. Language
- the language faculty
- models of linguistic data, words and rules theory
- Connectionist models of language
- language acquisition: speech segmentation, word learning, learning syntactic categories
- categorization and models of word meaning
- understanding sentences
2. Reasoning and generalization
- inductive reasoning
- fallacies and (ir)rationality
- models of abstraction and generalisation
- theory formation and the origins of knowledge
3. Fundamentals of cognitive neuroscience
- basic brain anatomy and function
- experimental techniques to record brain activity
- simple models of neurons
4. Vision
- the anatomy of vision, neural correlates of visual perception
- comparison of biological and artificial visual systems
5. Memory and Attention
- types of memory, memory impairments
- computational models of memory
6. Actions and behaviour
- reinforcement learning
Note that this course is intended to give a high-level introduction to the topics listed; subsequent courses (e.g., Computational Cognitive Science) will then provide a more detailed coverage.
