From Animal Learning to Changing People's Minds

Undergraduate catalogue cross-listing

Seminar designed to expose students to a modern, integrative view of animal learning phenomena from experimental psychology, through the lens of computational models and current neuroscientific knowledge. At the psychological level, we will concentrate on classical and instrumental conditioning. Computationally, we will view these as exemplars of prediction learning and action selection, the pillars of reinforcement learning. Neurally, we will focus on the roles of dopamine and the basal ganglia at the systems level. Students will see how the study of animal decision making can inform us about the computations that take place in the brain.