INF1-CG: Informatics 1 - Cognitive Science

This course is designed as a first introduction to Cognitive Science. It will provide a selective but representative overview of the subject, suitable for all interested students, including students on the Cognitive Science degrees and external students. The aim of the lecturing team is to present a unified view of the field, based on a computational approach to analysing cognition. The material is organized by cognitive function (e.g., language, vision), rather than by subdiscipline (e.g., psychology, neuroscience). The course covers language, vision, memory, control and action, and reasoning and generalization. All topics will be presented from a computational point of view, and this perspective will be reinforced by lab sessions in which students implement simple cognitive models.

Required Background

This course is suitable for outside students. But bear in mind:

• the assignments require programming in Python;
• Introduction to Cognitive Science provides relevant background; Informatics 1A is also useful;
• there will be some basic maths (calculus, probability, linear algebra).

The labs are designed to provide help with programming. 

There will also be office hours starting in week 4. These are drop-in session which you can use to ask any questions about the course, including the material covered in the lectures, tutorials, labs, and assignments. One of the TAs (Jordan) will be there to answer your questions. The times and locations are:

• Mondays, 5:00-6:00pm, Appleton Tower, room 2.07
• Tuesdays, 11:30am-12:30pm, Appleton Tower, room 7.14 (except for 25 Feb and 1 Apr: room AT 5.01)

The office hours run from week 4 to week 11. There will be no office hours in Flexible Learning Week (17-21 Feb).

Communication

When you sign up for the course, you will have access to:

• this website: the one place to find it all;
• essential communication will be sent by email;
• the course timetable; lists all the lecture slots and tutorial and lab times;
• the Learn page of the course with links to the Noteable system for labs and assignments;

We will use Piazza for the course:

• you can use it to post questions about the course content, including tutorials, labs and assignment;
• the main purpose is peer support: students discuss course material and help each other;
• lecturers and TAs moderate the discussion and contribute;
• Piazza can be accessed through the link in Learn;
• We will also use Wooclap as a polling and quizzing system during lectures.