Cognitive and Neural Bases of Person Knowledge

This course is discusses how people acquire knowledge about others. The first part of the course focuses on the perceptual mechanisms involved in the recognition of other agents, their identity, their facial expressions, and their actions. The second part of the course covers how these perceptual "ingredients" are used to make inferences about other people's mental states (i.e., their emotions), their beliefs, their goals, and their traits. During the course, we will read and discuss recent research articles, and explore how different types of evidence and different methods can be used to constrain theories of cognition and of the brain.