Department of Cognitive Science

605 Crawford Hall
www.case.edu/artsci/cogs
Phone: 216-368-4753; Fax: 216-368-3821
Todd Oakley, Chair
E-mail: todd.oakley@case.edu

Cognitive science is the scientific study of the mind in a transdisciplinary framework. The Department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University is specifically dedicated to the study of human higher cognition, including language, gesture, advanced social cognition, mathematical invention, scientific discovery, art, religion, music, literature, advanced tool use and advanced technology, theater and dance, fashions of dress, sign systems, creativity, and culture. The department draws on methods of research in the biological sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Its educational mission is to provide students with the best possible opportunity to integrate a wide variety of approaches and apply them to the study of human higher cognition.

The department provides basic training in core disciplines, as well as in a range of philosophical, evolutionary, linguistic, and computational issues bearing on cognitive science. It seeks to place cognitive science in a wider, more ecologically valid context than traditional programs in this field have typically allowed, so as to broaden our theories of those high-end cognitive capacities that mark human beings as distinctive.

The department offers an undergraduate major and minor in cognitive science and a master’s degree in cognitive linguistics. By developing wide-ranging expertise in at least two or three relevant disciplines, our students can prepare for a variety of career options. Training in several disciplines will also provide increased choices for postgraduate study.

Department Faculty

Faculty research interests are listed on the department’s Web site.

Todd Oakley, Ph.D.
(University of Maryland)
Associate Professor and Chair

Per Aage Brandt, Docteur d’Etat
(Sorbonne I)
Professor; Emile B. de Sauzé Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures

Anthony Jack, Ph.D.
(University College London)
Assistant Professor

Fey Parrill, Ph.D.
(University of Chicago)
Assistant Professor; Robson Junior Professor

Yanna Popova, D. Phil
(Oxford University)
Assistant Professor; Climo Junior Professor

Mark Turner, Ph.D.
(University of California, Berkeley)
Institute Professor

Lecturer

Vera Tobin, Ph.D.
(University of Maryland)
Secondary Faculty

James C. Alexander, Ph.D.
(Johns Hopkins University)
Professor of Mathematics

Richard J. Boland, Jr., Ph.D.
(Case Western Reserve University)
Professor of Information Systems, Weatherhead School of Management

Patrizia Bonaventura, Ph.D.
(Ohio State University)
Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences

Richard E. Boyatzis, Ph.D.
(Harvard University)
Professor of Organizational Behavior, Weatherhead School of Management

Charles Burroughs, Ph.D.
(The Warburg Institute)
Elsie B. Smith Professor of Liberal Arts; Professor of Classics

Daniela Calvetti, Ph.D.
(University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Professor of Mathematics

Angela Ciccia, Ph.D.
(Case Western Reserve University)
Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences

Fred Collopy, Ph.D.
(Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania)
Professor of Information Systems, Weatherhead School of Management

William E. Deal, Ph.D.
(Harvard University)
Severance Professor of the History of Religion
Professor of Religious Studies

Heath A. Demaree, Ph.D.
(Virginia Institute of Technology)
Associate Professor of Psychology

Robert L. Greene, Ph.D.
(Yale University)
Professor of Psychology

Sandra Russ, Ph.D.
(University of Pittsburgh)
Professor of Psychology

Peter Thomas, Ph.D.
(University of Chicago)
Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Peter J. Whitehouse, M.D., Ph.D.
(Johns Hopkins University)
Professor of Neurology

James Zull, Ph.D.
(University of Wisconsin)
Professor of Biology

Adjunct Faculty

Merlin W. Donald, Ph.D.
(McGill University)

Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Ph.D.
(University of California, Berkeley)
Curator and Head of Physical Anthropology, Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Kristina Hooper Woolsey, Ph.D.
(University of California, San Diego)

Undergraduate Programs

Major

In addition to meeting general education requirements, cognitive science majors must complete a minimum of 30 semester hours in cognitive science and approved related course work: 15 hours in the foundation component and 15 hours of elective course work. The foundation courses provide all students with a common basis for further study. They consist of COGS 101, 102, 201, 202, and a course in quantitative methods. Students then consult with a major advisor to devise a program of five additional electives.

Minor

The minor requires students to take two of the four courses in our core program (6 credits): COGS 101 (Introduction to Cognitive Science) and one of COGS 102, 201, or 202. In addition, students take three COGS courses at the 200 or 300 level (9 credits), for a total of 15 credits. This provides a good basic grounding in the field, and allows students to narrow their exposure to the aspects of the field most relevant to their other academic interests. Individual programs can be developed in consultation with the chair of the department.

Graduate Program

M.A. in Cognitive Linguistics

What is cognitive linguistics? “Cognitive linguistics goes beyond the visible structure of language and investigates the considerably more complex backstage operations of cognition that create grammar, conceptualization, discourse, and thought itself. The theoretical insights of cognitive linguistics are based on extensive empirical observation in multiple contexts, and on experimental work in psychology and neuroscience. Results of cognitive linguistics, especially from metaphor theory and conceptual integration theory, have been applied to wide ranges of nonlinguistic phenomena.”

—Gilles Fauconnier, Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (2006)

Candidates may apply for admission to the degree program in cognitive linguistics, with the purpose of pursuing the M.A., or for non-degree status, with the purpose of taking courses for credit that can be transferred to other institutions. The M.A. follows Plan A as described in the Graduate Student Handbook of Case Western Reserve University. Accordingly, it requires 30 credit hours and a written M.A. thesis.

Course Descriptions

COGS 101. Introduction to Cognitive Science (3)
This course introduces students to the field of cognitive science. Cognitive scientists are interested in the nature of the human mind--basically, we ask how humans think. This is a huge question, and has been addressed in one way or another by pretty much every academic field. Cognitive science tries to unite work from many different fields, including computer science, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, music, art, and literary theory. In this course, you’ll get a basic introduction to some of the topics that are central to human cognition, such as intelligence, categorization, language, and creativity. We’ll ask what can be gained by taking an integrated, cognitive scientific approach to these topics.

COGS 102. Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience (3)
A survey of the fundamental methods, findings, and theories that attempt to understand the human mind from a neuroscientific standpoint. The course provides the student with background knowledge of brain processes underlying such psychological phenomena as consciousness, sensation, perception, thought, language, and voluntary action. Since many fields of neuroscience have contributed to cognitive neuroscience, the approach of this course is cross-disciplinary. It introduces theories and data from clinical and experimental neuropsychology, brain imaging, neuroelectric and neuromagnetic brain activity, the neuroscience of language, and behavioral neuroscience, among other fields.

COGS 201. Human Cognition in Evolution and Development (3)
COGS 201 covers mind unfolding in time, including the fundamental methods, findings, and theories of human mental phylo- and onto-genesis. It provides the student with background knowledge about the unfolding of cognitive structures and functions over time, in both the deep temporal perspective of evolution (measured across many lifetimes) and the shorter one of development (measured within single lifetimes). The approach of the course is cross-disciplinary, including approaches that come from anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, computing science, comparative psychology, primatology, and comparative linguistics, among others.

COGS 202. Human Cognition Viewed from a Cultural Perspective (3)
This course studies the human mind in its natural environment: culture. It covers the fundamental methods, findings, and theories that attempt to understand the growth and evolution of cognition from either a social science or humanistic standpoint. It provides the student with background knowledge of theories of human cultural evolution and change, of the relationship between the cognizing individual and larger social-cognitive structures, and of such phenomena as distributed networks, cooperative mental work, and the phenomenology of human experience. Many disciplines have contributed to this knowledge; hence the approach of this course is cross-disciplinary, including ideas from cultural anthropology, literary studies, art and art history, musicology, philosophy, and the history of technology, among others.

COGS 204. Cognition and Computation (3)
This course explores possible uses of computational technology in the study of cognition. (1) The human or animal mind-supporting brain is not in any technical sense “just” a computer, but it is relevant to stimulate various cognitive phenomena by computation in order to model their formal properties. From perception to conception, images schemas, categories, and meanings found in linguistic semantics and syntax, and from bodily motion to the processes of abstraction, intentional orientation, and spatial navigation, computational modeling can help us understand mental architecture, the interrelations between iconicity and symbolization in mental representations, and the constraints and indeterminacies at work in social cognitive networks (distributed cognition). (2) It also is relevant in this course to analyze the cognitive roles of actual computation as a social and communicational technology, mirroring certain of our mental routines on the screens we interact with and we program to manifest symbolic and iconic behaviors in ever-changing patterns of “Interface” communication, while the underlying systems control our social and technical environment. (3) Recent developments in Cognitive Robotics finally invite for an integration of semantic stimulation and the elaboration and implementation of language-based and motion-based competencies in mobile robots. Computation serves, in this perspective, the construction of a dynamic model of meaning linked to interaction (human-machine, machine-machine, and human to human).

COGS 205. Cognition and Design (3)
Urbanism is design; architecture is design; of course, the aesthetic shaping of artifacts (such as computers, cars, and coffee machines) is design. Configuring surfaces, volumes, and portions of space in special ways, creating and changing formats for things and places that allow cultural practices to unfold while delimiting them, are essential ‘designing” endeavors of human civilization and are, necessarily, activities based on the cognitive capacities and constraints of our species. We ‘cognize’ the human world in terms and frames of ‘designed’ surroundings. Design is a basic expressive activity, by which we interact with our artificial and natural surroundings and create ‘interfaces’ between mind and reality, thus upholding and interpretable world. Landscapes and cityscapes, work spaces of all sorts, buildings and parks, exteriors and interiors of homes, factories, institutions, and temples; furniture, artifacts such as machines, tools, weapons, symbolic objects, even the configuration (‘building’) of our own bodies, are design. An inquiry into cultural cognition, aiming to understand how humans as socio-cultural beings think and feel, therefore needs to explore this dimension of spatial expressivity and to acknowledge it as a constitutive fact of human meaning production; it needs to study the aesthetic and pragmatic, political and historical, philosophical and religious, and simply everyday practical, semiotic aspects of this basic form of human creativity. This course will focus on spatial expressivity--design--in several primary keys and scales, including design for learning; design for verbal and technical communication, interaction, and commerce; design for expressions of authority and deliberation; and design for emotional display.

COGS 206. Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics (3)
This course is both an exposure to the technical field of cognitive linguistics--suitable in itself as part of a liberal education--and a gateway to advanced study of cognitive linguistics, leading to special topics and capstone experiences inside the cognitive science major. This course focuses on the methods that have been developed in cognitive linguistics in the last ten to twenty years for the study of grammar, semantics, and their relations to cognition.

COGS 272. Morality and Mind (3)
Recent research in cognitive science challenges ethical perspectives founded on the assumption that rationality is key to moral knowledge or that morality is the product of divine revelation. Bedrock moral concepts like free will, rights, and moral agency also have been questioned. In light of such critiques, how can we best understand moral philosophy and religious ethics? Is ethics primarily informed by nature or by culture? Or is ethics informed by both? This course examines 1) ways in which cognitive science--and related fields such as evolutionary biology--impact traditional moral perspectives, and 2) how the study of moral philosophy and comparative ethics forces reconsideration of broad cognitive science theories about the nature of ethics. The course examines the concept of free will as a case study in applying these interpretive viewpoints. Interdisciplinary readings include literature from moral philosophy, religious ethics, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. Offered as COGS 272, RLGN 272.

COGS 301. Special Topics in Cognitive Science (3)
This course offers instructors the opportunity to cover a more advanced and specialized topic in the field of cognitive science for third and fourth year students. Topics will vary from year to year.

COGS 302. SAGES Departmental Seminar: Methods and Theories in Cognitive Science (3)
This course takes a look at the discipline of cognitive science by exploring the methods that cognitive scientists use in their research. We’ll discuss how different methods reflect different approaches and traditions of thought and how they provide different answers to particular questions. We’ll also discuss the process of translating research into writing and talk about how different kinds of writing reflect the many different methods used in cognitive science. Recommended preparation: COGS 101, COGS 102, COGS 201, COGS 202.

SAGES Dept Seminar
COGS 303. SAGES Departmental Seminar: Current Controversies in Cognitive Science (3)
This course takes a look at the discipline of cognitive science by exploring the current controversies that impact cognitive scientists in their research. We’ll discuss how different controversies effect different approaches and traditions of thought and how they elicit different answers to particular questions. We’ll also discuss the process of translating research into writing and talk about how different kinds of writing reflect the many different controversial issues presented in cognitive science. Recommended preparation: COGS 101, COGS 102, COGS 201, and COGS 202.

SAGES Dept Seminar
COGS 304. Conceptual Integration (3)
Conceptual Integration, otherwise known as “blending”, is a defining feature of higher-order human cognition, indispensable for all behaviors typically taken as distinctive to human beings. This course presents the cognitive mechanisms of conceptual integration, the constraints on its operation, and its deployment and expression in a range of human behaviors such as learning, invention, mathematical and scientific discovery, language, art music, gesture, social understanding, institutional performance, reasoning, decision, judgment, choice, design, and engineering. A student in the class will work on an individual research project in any of a variety of fields, including engineering (e.g. designing with blends), computer science, the arts, the humanities, the social sciences, cognitive neuroscience, and linguistics. Only one of COGS 304 and COGS 404 can be taken for credit within any degree program.
Offered as COGS 304 and COGS 404.

COGS 313. Special Topics in Cognitive Linguistics (3)
This course covers special topics in the field of cognitive linguistics. Topics will vary from semester to semester.
Offered as COGS 313 and COGS 413.

COGS 314. Animal Cognition and Consciousness (4)
This course examines the notions of intelligence, cognition, reasoning, consciousness, and mental content as they appear in the philosophical views and empirical studies of animals in individual and social contexts. We will review scientific findings that suggest striking likenesses and intriguing differences in the (apparent) thought processes of humans and animals, and ask whether the research techniques that brought us these results are fully adequate to measuring such unobservable entities as conscious experience and thought. Techniques of measurement range from naturalistic observation, to the processing of vocalizations, to memory and problem solving tasks, and the imaging of brain processes through fMRI scans, etc. Students will face the challenges and rewards of practicing these techniques and reworking philosophical theories in the service component of the course. Students will participate in veterinary or shelter work to provide needed animal care while studying animal behavior using cognitive ethological methods. We will compare methods for measuring consciousness and intelligence in animals to those used for human beings, and ask questions about the possibility of machine consciousness and the emergent property of group consciousness.
Offered as BIOL 314, COGS 314, PHIL 314 and PHIL 414.

COGS 315. Mental Space Theory (3)
This course covers theory of mental spaces and methodology of mental space analysis, with special emphasis on the use of mental space theory to analyze human performance in various areas of cognition, including reasoning, judgment, decision, counterfactual thought, inference, planning, communication and language, gesture, social cognition, cognitive design and engineering, representation, learning, humor, symbol systems, and invention. It includes a consideration of experimental methods that have arisen under the influence of mental space theory. A student may earn credit for either COGS 315 or COGS 415, but not both.
Offered as COGS 315 and COGS 415.

COGS 325. Cognitive Approaches to Literature (3)
This course approaches literature as a window into language, in which cognition is characterized by the same imaging and imaginary properties as artistic literature. It is an attempt to identify and analyze procedures as aesthetically interesting and generally relevant forms of human thinking, feeling, imagining, fantasizing, and conceptualizing. The course introduces current theories of literature in relation to language and mind, and it presents and discusses practical applications in critical reading and text analysis, using examples from modern literature in the main genres. A student may earn credit for either COGS 325 or COGS 425 but not both. Recommended preparation: COGS 101, COGS 202.
Offered as COGS 325 and COGS 425.

COGS 326. Cognitive Approaches to Music (3)
This course will study the ways in which the presence of music relates to cognition and the semiotics of inter-subjective communication at large--the emergence of language, gesture, and symbolization of time. Topics of interests include: the ways that specific works of musical art invite semantic interpretation; how intelligible musical structure relates to meaning; how musical activities correspond to brain activity; and how music relates to and/or induces emotion. Recommended preparation: COGS 101, COGS 202.
Offered as COGS 326 and COGS 426.

COGS 327. Gesture in Cognition and Communication (3)
Most people never notice that when they are talking, they’re also gesturing. Why do we produce these gestures? What can studying them tell us about the human mind? This course surveys scientific research on gesture, exploring topics such as the role of gesture in communication, cross-cultural differences in gesture, and the relationship between gesture and signed languages. The course will focus on gestures produced with speech, but will cover symbolic and ritualized gesture in the visual arts and in dance.
Offered as COGS 327 and COGS 427 and MLIT 327.

COGS 328. Cognition and Visual Aesthetic Experience (3)
This course is offered as a reciprocal exchange between new research on the mind/brain and existing theories of visual aesthetics. It would appeal to students from diverse majors, ranging from art, language or philosophy, to psychology, computer science or pre-medicine. The material covered links a traditional approach to philosophical aesthetics with a most up-to-date research on visual perception and brain functioning. Recommended preparation: COGS 101, COGS 202.

COGS 329. Performance and the Embodied Mind (3)
In the past twenty years cognitive scientists working in neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and related fields have made great progress in understanding perception, empathy, the human mind’s sense of space and movement, emotions, meaning-making, and many other cognitive areas that are crucial to producing, enacting, and responding to performances on stage. This course will look at ways of incorporating many of the insights of cognitive science into the existing work of theatre and performance scholarship. The course will thus link a more traditional approach to the body in theatre and dance studies, where it has commonly been considered one of the main means of communication, to a most up-to-date research on embodied cognition. Observation of live and pre-recorded dance and theatre performances will regularly be used to supplement the theoretical discussion. Recommended preparation: COGS 101, COGS 202.

COGS 352. Language, Cognition, and Religion (3)
This course utilizes theoretical approaches found in cognitive semantics--a branch of cognitive linguistics--to study the conceptual structures and meanings of religious language. Cognitive semantics, guided by the notion that conceptual structures are embodied, examines the relationship between conceptual systems and the construction of meaning. We consider such ideas as conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual blending, Image schemas, cross-domain mappings, metonymy, mental spaces, and idealized cognitive models. We apply these ideas to selected Christian, Buddhist, and Chinese religious texts in order to understand ways in which religious language categorizes and conceptualizes the world. We examine both the universality of cognitive linguistic processes and the culturally specific metaphors, conceptual blends, image schemas, and other cognitive operations that particular texts and traditions utilize.
Course Offered as RLGN 352/RLGN 452 and COGS 352/452.

COGS 363. Philosophy and Social Neuroscience (3)
A philosophical examination of recent research in human cognition and emotion at the intersection of the social sciences and neurological sciences. The course provides the student with background knowledge of brain processes underlying such social and cultural phenomena as bonding, aggression, imitation, mind-attribution, language, sexual behavior, moral action, and creativity. The approach of this course is at once scientific (comparing methods, findings and questions as they arise in clinical and experimental neuropsychology, brain imaging, neurolinguistics, and behavioral neuroscience) and humanistic, asking critical questions about the nature and methods of a science of cognition, and surveying moral responses from a neurologic and philosophic perspective. Recommended preparation: PHIL 101 or COGS 201.
Offered as COGS 363 and PHIL 363.

COGS 365. Advanced Topics in Cognitive Neuroscience (3)
This course focuses on specific areas of research in cognitive neuroscience in some depth. The first half of the semester covers basics and fundamental research areas (e.g., perception, attention) and examines the (sometimes controversial) theoretical issue of what cognitive neuroscience techniques tell us about the mind. The second half of the semester is dedicated to examining selected research topics of interest to students. Students research and write ‘grant proposals’ for cognitive neuroscience experiments. The class culminates with students and invited faculty simulating a funding panel, and deciding which grants to ‘fund’ from a limited budget.
Prereq: COGS 102.

COGS 366. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (3)
fMRI is the workhorse of cognitive neuroscience research. This course will take an in-depth look at this methodology, including hands on experience analyzing imaging data. The course will address the following issues: How do MRI and fMRI work? What does fMRI actually measure and how does that relate to cognition? What are the standard steps involved in processing and analyzing fMRI data to help answer specific questions? The course culminates in the production of a report of a novel analysis of imagining data that the students have performed (in small groups), including a broader description of what that analysis reveals about the neural basis of cognition.
Prereq: COGS 102 and COGS 365.

COGS 373. Intelligence and Cognition (3)
This course will focus on the notion and meaning of intelligence. What is intelligence? How is it measured, and are these measures adequate to the task? Is there more than one kind of intelligence? What is the relationship between individuals, genetic factors, biological factors, and socio-cultural-economic factors in the development of intelligence? How are language and thought related to intelligence? What is the difference between intelligence and talent? Intelligence seems to be necessary for culture, art, religious belief, the creation of theories and the quest for knowledge, truth and morality; thus intelligence is a necessary condition for the study of itself. To attempt to understand intelligence is an undertaking in which we will ask questions about the self and the common nature of humanity, while simultaneously examining the abilities of animals and machines. What is the mark of intelligence? Recommended preparation: PHIL 101 or COGS 201.
Offered as COGS 373 and PHIL 373.

COGS 381. Philosophy and Cognitive Neuroscience (3)
This course will focus on the various methodologies used in the cognitive neurosciences, and explore their strengths and weaknesses from scientific and philosophical standpoints. We will begin by examining baseline measures (including IQ tests, tasks of cognitive flexibility, verbal and visual memory, causal/sequential thinking and narrative tasks) and their experimental design. Lesion methods will follow, with an eye toward understanding the strength of inferences that can be drawn from such data. The course will also focus on imaging techniques (CAT, PET, SPECT, fMRI, TMS, etc.) as well as measures of electrical activity such as EEG and single-cell recordings. Students will become familiar with many fundamental assumptions necessary for the implementation of each method, and philosophical questions associated with these endeavors and their potential impact on our knowledge and society. Recommend preparation: PHIL 101 or COGS 201.
Offered as COGS 381 and PHIL 381.

COGS 383L. Vocalization and Cognition Lab (1)
This is a laboratory section intended to provide hands-on training and experience with sound processing and analysis of animal vocalizations in the context of cognitive science, philosophy, and biology. Students will ask and answer questions surrounding language, meaning, mind, mental states, animal and human cognition. How does a science of content and language actually proceed? How do we measure behavior for use as an indicator of cognition? What pragmatic constraints are found when we explore the natural world? What causes us to interpret certain symbols as systematic? The laboratory work begins with an understanding of different software for sound analysis with an emphasis on the bioacoustic experimental method. Frog vocalization exercises will familiarize students with the process of data categorization, analysis and comparison, and will be the foundation for understanding hypothesis testing within a Darwinian theoretical backdrop. Cetacean vocalization analysis will press students to move beyond comparison and analysis to consider and evaluate the standard evidence types used in cognitive science to measure the mind. Recommended preparation: PHIL 101 or COGS 201.
Offered as COGS 383L and PHIL 383L.

COGS 390. Introduction to General Semiotics (3)
Semiotics, the study of meaning and signs conveying meaning, is a central part of cognitive semiotics, or ‘high level’ cognitive semantics. This discipline is typically taught in departments of linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, or cultural studies. The domain of semiotics is in fact widely intersecting with other disciplines (general linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, anthropology, music, literature, architecture, and the arts). Sign theory, text theory, studies of narrative structure, enunciation, natural logic, rhetoric and poetics, speech act forms, are important components in this field.

COGS 391. Introduction to Text Semiotics (3)
Introduction to Text Semiotics addresses both students of Literature and students in Cognitive Science. Most of the authors included in the reading list extend their linguistic approach towards fields that intersect literature, psychology, philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology. The scholarly traditions of text analysis and structural theory of meaning, including authors from classical formalism, structuralism, structural semiotics, and new criticism will be connected to cognitive theories of meaning construction in test, discourse, and cultural expressions in general. The focus of this course, taught as a seminar, is on empirical studies, specific text analyses, discourse analyses, speech act analyses, and other studies of speech, writing, and uses of language in cultural contexts. This course thus introduces to a study of literature and cultural expressions based on cognitive science and modern semiotics--the new view that has be coined Cognitive Semiotics.
Offered as COGS 391 and WLIT 391.

COGS 397. SAGES Capstone in Cognitive Science (3)
Supervised original research on a topic in cognitive science, culminating in a public presentation. The research may be in the form of an independent research project, a literature review, or some other form approved by the department.

SAGES Senior Cap
COGS 399. Independent Studies in Cognitive Science (1–3)
This course is for students with special interests and commitments that are not fully addressed in regular courses, and who wish to work independently.

COGS 404. Conceptual Integration (1–3)
Conceptual Integration, otherwise known as “blending”, is a defining feature of higher-order human cognition, indispensable for all behaviors typically taken as distinctive to human beings. This course presents the cognitive mechanisms of conceptual integration, the constraints on its operation, and its deployment and expression in a range of human behaviors such as learning, invention, mathematical and scientific discovery, language, art music, gesture, social understanding, institutional performance, reasoning, decision, judgment, choice, design, and engineering. A student in the class will work on an individual research project in any of a variety of fields, including engineering (e.g. designing with blends), computer science, the arts, the humanities, the social sciences, cognitive neuroscience, and linguistics. Only one of COGS 304 and COGS 404 can be taken for credit within any degree program.
Offered as COGS 304 and COGS 404.

COGS 406. Theory of Cognitive Linguistics I (3)
COGS 406 is the first course in a two-course sequence designed to provide an introduction to cognitive linguistics at the M.A. level. It supports student work in COGS 408 and 409; the Workshop courses. This course begins with a discussion of major theoretical questions in linguistics. We first ask how these questions have been approached within theoretical frameworks which view language and general cognition as being separate from one another. The course then focuses on the methods that have been developed in cognitive linguistics in the last ten to twenty years for the study of phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. We ask how approaches that relate language to general cognitive processes (perception, memory, categorization, etc.) can lead to a deeper understanding both of language and of the human mind.

COGS 407. Theory of Cognitive Linguistics II (3)
COGS 407 is the second course in a two-course sequence designed to provide an introduction to theory of cognitive linguistics at the MA level. It covers contemporary theory in cognitive linguistics in greater detail and supports student work in COGS 408 and 409, the Workshop courses.
Prereq: COGS 406 or consent of instructor.

COGS 408. Workshop on Cognitive Linguistics I (3)
This is the first in a two-course sequence (408 & 409) designed to provide experience in research methods in cognitive linguistics at the MA level. A workshop in which students read examples of cognitive linguistics research, develop their own topics (theoretical or empirical), and work on them to produce a final paper.

COGS 409. Workshop in Cognitive Linguistics II (3)
The second course in a two-course sequence (408 & 409) designed to provide experience in research methods in cognitive linguistics at the MA level. A workshop in which students read examples of cognitive linguistics research, develop their own topics (theoretical or empirical), and work on them to produce a final paper.
Prereq: COGS 408 or consent of instructor.

COGS 413. Special Topics in Cognitive Linguistics (3)
This course covers special topics in the field of cognitive linguistics. Topics will vary from semester to semester.
Offered as COGS 313 and COGS 413.

COGS 415. Mental Space Theory (3)
This course covers theory of mental spaces and methodology of mental space analysis, with special emphasis on the use of mental space theory to analyze human performance in various areas of cognition, including reasoning, judgment, decision, counterfactual thought, inference, planning, communication and language, gesture, social cognition, cognitive design and engineering, representation, learning, humor, symbol systems, and invention. It includes a consideration of experimental methods that have arisen under the influence of mental space theory. A student may earn credit for either COGS 315 or COGS 415, but not both.
Offered as COGS 315 and COGS 415.

COGS 425. Cognitive Approaches to Literature (3)
This course approaches literature as a window into language, in which cognition is characterized by the same imaging and imaginary properties as artistic literature. It is an attempt to identify and analyze procedures as aesthetically interesting and generally relevant forms of human thinking, feeling, imagining, fantasizing, and conceptualizing. The course introduces current theories of literature in relation to language and mind, and it presents and discusses practical applications in critical reading and text analysis, using examples from modern literature in the main genres. A student may earn credit for either COGS 325 or COGS 425 but not both. Recommended preparation: COGS 101, COGS 202.
Offered as COGS 325 and COGS 425.

COGS 426. Cognitive Approaches to Music (3)
This course will study the ways in which the presence of music relates to cognition and the semiotics of inter-subjective communication at large--the emergence of language, gesture, and symbolization of time. Topics of interests include: the ways that specific works of musical art invite semantic interpretation; how intelligible musical structure relates to meaning; how musical activities correspond to brain activity; and how music relates to and/or induces emotion. Recommended preparation: COGS 101, COGS 202.
Offered as COGS 326 and COGS 426.

COGS 427. Gesture in Cognition and Communication (3)
Most people never notice that when they are talking, they’re also gesturing. Why do we produce these gestures? What can studying them tell us about the human mind? This course surveys scientific research on gesture, exploring topics such as the role of gesture in communication, cross-cultural differences in gesture, and the relationship between gesture and signed languages. The course will focus on gestures produced with speech, but will cover symbolic and ritualized gesture in the visual arts and in dance.
Offered as COGS 327 and COGS 427 and MLIT 327.

COGS 452. Language, Cognition, and Religion (3)
This course utilizes theoretical approaches found in cognitive semantics--a branch of cognitive linguistics--to study the conceptual structures and meanings of religious language. Cognitive semantics, guided by the notion that conceptual structures are embodied, examines the relationship between conceptual systems and the construction of meaning. We consider such ideas as conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual blending, Image schemas, cross-domain mappings, metonymy, mental spaces, and idealized cognitive models. We apply these ideas to selected Christian, Buddhist, and Chinese religious texts in order to understand ways in which religious language categorizes and conceptualizes the world. We examine both the universality of cognitive linguistic processes and the culturally specific metaphors, conceptual blends, image schemas, and other cognitive operations that particular texts and traditions utilize.
Course Offered as RLGN 352/RLGN 452 and COGS 352/452.

COGS 499. Independent Studies (1–3)
This course is a face-to-face seminar between students and instructor, aiming at letting and helping the students independently develop original research on well-defined topics in the field of cognitive linguistics. Themes can vary within the wide area of cognition and culture.