Courses Offered

• Attention and Perception (Winter Semester)

Attention is one of the major cognitive processes responsible for making us achieve our day-to-day goals. This course-work aims to introduce fundamental principles of how attention helps us to perceive the world around us. Students will be introduced to various experimental paradigms and theories (both classical and contemporary) used to study effects and limitation of attention on human behavior and perception. With the balanced practical sessions and assignments students will develop a fundamental understanding of designing behavioral experiments to study various cognitive processes.

• Introduction to Psychology (Monsoon Semester)

This course is about how and why people think, feel and behave. Students will learn and apply theories of mind, and behavior. Students will learn to think more critically and scientifically about what makes people think, feel, and behave. This course offers students an engaging introduction to the essential topics in psychology. Throughout this study of human behavior and the mind, students will gain insight into the history of the field of psychology, as well as explore current theories and issues in areas such as cognition and perception. The main goals of this course are to acquaint students with different areas contained within psychology, to provide them with some of the major concepts of each area. Basic topics that would be covered would be historical and contemporary psychology, including various perspectives: biological, Psychoanalytic (Freudian), behavioral (Skinner, Pavlov, and other theories), cognitive, Transactional analysis. Some practical topics like Memory, Personality, cognition and Cognitive behavior therapy would also be covered. Students will also learn the concepts of Intelligence. Computational Psychology, Computational Neuroscience and Technological research in interventions would also be explored.

• Cognition of Motor Movement (Monsoon Semester)

Motor movement corresponds to various kinds of movement that we execute in everyday life like hand movements (reaching, grasping), eye movements, walking etc. A comprehensive understanding of human motor system would help in engineering better tools, systems, robots, neuroprosthetics etc. This course work is designed to start with the introduction to the human motor system, different types of action or movement like; grasping, reaching, spatial navigation, eye-movement etc. This will be followed by understanding of the mechanics, neurophysiology and psychology of action planning and execution.