Courses

I teach a number of courses for the Psychology Department from year-to-year. These include:
  • Infant Development (31:118) This course is an upper level undergraduate course intended to cover all aspects of the first two years of life (including the prenatal period). We cover physical, neural, visual, cognitive, linguistic and social development, with an emphasis on experimental work, developmental mechanism, and how we know what we know about infants. This course is taught from a developmental science perspective and often stresses the questions rather than the answers.

  • Laboratory in Psychology (31:121) In this upper level undergraduate course, students envision, design and carry out an entire experiment on perception. Themed around perceptual categorization, students lead every aspect of the project: coming up with the ideas, generating the stimuli, collecting the data and analyzing the results. A time-intensive, but rewarding course for anyone considering a career in research.

  • Developmental Science Proseminar (31:210) This graduate course turns development on its head! Rather than teaching development as a series of domain-specific units (e.g. language development, cognitive development), this course is focused around mechanism. Each semester we examine three mechanisms of development. Things like the role of the caregiver, spontaneous (random) activity, contingency & expectation or online problemsolving. Within each mechanism we cover a range of developmental phenomenon where this mechanism manifests itself, phenomemon like neural organization, motor control, language, vision, cognition and social behavior.

  • Summer Workshop on the Practice of Connectionism This summer workshop (intended for graduate students) taught participants how to program their own connectionist networks (AKA neural networks) from scratch using Matlab. Students learned hebbian learning, kohonen networks, the delta-rule and backpropagation, and simple-recurrent networks.

Students

My research program is driven by my students. Undergraduates, graduates, even alumni play an important role in all aspects of my research program. You can see the complete group at the MACLab site. I am currently mentoring four graduate students and one post-doc on a variety of projects in language, cognition and development.
  • Shannon Ross-Sheehy (Ph.D. 2004, University of Iowa),Post-Doc
  • Kristine Kovack (B.A., Valpariaso University), 5th year.
  • Joseph Toscano (B.S., 2005, University of Rochester), 3rd year.
  • Cheyenne Munson (B.S., 2005, Oberlin College), 3rd year.
  • Marcus Galle (B.A., 2006, Texas A&M University), 2nd year.
Page maintained by Bob McMurray
Last updated on 8/1/07