Course Plans
Overview of Requirements
Fourteen term courses, for a total of thirteen and one half course credits, are required for the major: Introduction to Cognitive Science (CGSC110), the Junior Colloquium (half credit, CGSC395), the Senior Colloquium (CGSC491), a skills course, four breadth courses, and six depth courses.
Each student chooses a combination of skills, breadth, and depth courses that must be approved by the director of undergraduate studies in order to assure overall coherence. No course may be used to fulfill more than one requirement for the major.
Full details about these requirements can be found in the Yale Catalog Cognitive Science listing. The rest of this page provides diverse examples of Depth Course combinations. Your own course plan may not look like any of these–these are intended to show several of the most common major themes students pursue in the major, and your theme may be quite different from these examples!
Sample Depth Combinations for Different Course Plans (click titles to expand)
Theme: Comparative Cognition
This example set of depth courses looks at how cognition varies across different animal species, shedding light on which aspects of human thinking are shared with other animals and which might be distinctive to humans.
Theme: Gender and Prejudice
This theme draws courses from across the university to look at the role of gender in different treatment experienced by males and females at the individual, group, and institutional levels.
Theme: Group Behavior
This example draws each of its depth classes from a different department to gain an interdisciplinary understanding of group behavior. How is the behavior of a 100-person group different from the behavior of 100 individuals?
Theme: Human-Computer Interaction
This example combines courses from computer science with other disciplines to consider novel ways to design user interfaces for emerging technologies.
Theme: Irrationality
This theme focuses on situations where people show behavior that they would not, on reflection, endorse. Especially when this is due to “rules of thumb” that are typically beneficial, it suggests systematic influences from heuristics, and thus opportunities for interventions to improve decision-making.
Theme: Law and Politics
This example combines classes both from within and outside of affiliated departments to investigate how recent discoveries about psychology can be applied to public policy, with a special focus on the justice system.
Theme: Mind and Computation
This theme focuses (not exclusively) on courses from linguistics and computer science to look at how advances in natural language processing in computer systems can inform theories of the human mind.
Theme: Moral Psychology
This theme draws courses from across the university to investigate the question of the moral beliefs and behaviors people have, and how these compare to ethical theories about the beliefs and behaviors they should have according to moral philosophy.
Theme: Numerical Cognition
This theme investigates how human numerical ability influences other aspects of human cognition and behavior, and how numerical skills evolved in humans in comparison to other species.
ANTH 280 Evolution of Primate Intelligence