Common Sense

(3 Credits)

What is common sense and what are its cognitive origins? This course interrogates commonsense notions we have about people, places, and things, notions that support our knowledge and reasoning in everyday life. For example, from infancy, we know that objects are solid, places are navigable, and people act in ways consistent with their goals. Yet, such common sense eludes today's best artificial intelligence. How does our human common sense allow us to be the best knowers and learners on earth? In this course, students will unravel the cognitive origins of human common sense through the lens of behavioral experiments with infants and children, with close readings of primary research articles, analysis of experimental stimuli and tasks, and interaction with open datasets. By staging experiments in the NYU New York professor's exclusive "round room" and in the National Museum of Mathematics in New York, students will participate in both science and scientific outreach. By the end of the course, students will have designed a creative and novel experiment that empowers them as learners and motivates them with the excitement of scientific discovery. This course will be taught at NYU New York and will count as an Away January-Term course.