Winter 2026
COGSCI600: Cognitive Science

Schedule: Thursdays 10:00am-12:50pm
Room: DC 2568
Instructor: Jesse Hoey

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Deliverables

Please read this page fully and carefully. It contains the necessary guidelines for the required elements in COGSCI 600

Physical Artifact

For one invited lecture and for your final project, you are tasked with finding or building, and presenting a physical artifact. In the era of generative AI, it is becoming increasingly difficult to evaluate student work outside of closed-book in-person examinations. One way around this is to require that students build something. A computer program or the digital ouput of a computer program (even as a 2D or 3D printout) is a digital artifact and does not qualify. A painting or picture also does not qualify unless I can see that it was made by a human hand. However, a robot and the computer program controlling it do qualify, which means a painting that is physically drawn by a physical robot would also qualify, however I imagine in that case the interest would be in the robot artist, and not as much in the art itself. I will show examples of artifacts in the first class. Check with me if you are unsure.

• For one invited lecture, you will build some kind of physical demonstration of something covered in the lecture. The following week, you will present the artifcat in class in a short 5 minute "show-and-tell" presentation.
• The artifact can be very informal, unfinished, prototypical, and the presentation can be very informal and as participatory as you like.
• Your invited lecture artifact can be on any week of your choice, but try to get it done early so we don't end up with everyone on the last invited lecture.
• Presentation of your project artifact will be part of your project presentation grade. Presentation of the invited lecture artifact will be graded separately and is worth 5% of your final grade. It will be a pass/fail grade. You will pass if you present a physical artifact that you made.
• Due date: Presentation of an artifact related to the lecture on week N is due prior to the lecture on week N+1.

Topics

Topics may be selected from any area of cognitive science. Many students pick something they are already working on and write a project based on that. For example, someone who works in sustainability may be researching the way that people respond to messaging or nudges about EVs. From a cogntive science perspective, this in itself could take on many forms. An artificial intelligence researcher might think of how to automatically deliver messages that had a desired emotional impact on a particular set of people. A public policy researcher might look at the outcomes from various existing nudges, and someone studying neuroscience might study how some hormone promotes long term thinking in the brain. The invited speakers come from a range of disciplines in order to present students with the breadth of research in cognitive science. The invited talks give students the resources and methods for doing research in a diversity of disciplines while studying cognitive science. The key strength of interdisciplinary research is precisely this: to bring ideas from one discipline into another. So maybe the AI researcher might hear about the policy documents and decide these might make useful training data for an AI system, or maybe the neuroscientist might hear about a new kind of artificial neural network from the AI scientist and realize this might provide a computational model for the hormonal interactions on reward.

Ethical Approval

Important: If your plan to involve human participants in your project (e.g. do a survey, test an instrument), you must get ethical approval, and you must start this process immediately as it can take six weeks or more. See Office of Research Ethics. I don't have a blanket ethics procedure for the course, as projects are too varied to allow for that, so each student or group is responsible for their own ethics applications if needed.

Evaluation

The project reports will be evaluated on four main criteria, with weights as shown. These are used as guidelines for the instructor when evaluating the work.

• Completeness (50%): does the report state contributions, claims, assumptions, strengths and weaknesses? Does the report have an abstract that clearly defines the work and results? Does the report give a complete overview of the methods used? Does the report give sufficient details of the method to allow replication? Does the report provide a discussion that appropriately summarises the work? Are there experimental or theoretical results to back up the claims? Is there a conclusion that adequately summarises the work, including the main claims and results? Are there sufficient references? Does the report contain evidence of interdisciplinarity (at least two areas of cognitive science)?
• Clarity (30%): is the report clear, readable, and free of spelling and grammar errors, and presented using the required format?
• References (10%): are the references correctly formatted, complete (e.g. including page numbers, book titles, years, etc), and are the guidelines for citing wikipedia and other online content respected (see below)?
• Originality (10%): does the report uncover something novel? You do not need to invent time-travel to get this extra 10%! An original take on an old problem, or an original problem statement can be sufficient. Clearly state in your report what is novel about your work, and indicate why it is significant! Claiming something novel is important, but you have to also make sure you claim is backed up by your work to get full novelty marks.

Academic Integrity

All submitted work (assignments and project reports) should be the submitting student's own work, and should bear his/her name as author. Any evidence of writing from a different person or source will be considered plagiarism and will be dealt with as such (see University policy below). A few simple rules may help you here:

1. ALWAYS write your own submitted work.
2. CLEARLY indicate contributions from anyone else: enclose the text in "quotations" and CLEARLY indicate the source right next to the text. Just citing the work that you are quoting from at the end in the bibliography is NOT sufficient. Rule 2 must be applied IMMEDIATELY upon putting any text or image that is not your own into your document. Don't wait, you'll regret it later when you submit your work but have forgotten to go back and put in the citation.
3. DON'T cut and paste.
4. If you do cut and paste (remember: don't cut and paste - see rule 3), then apply rule 2 IMMEDIATELY.
5. DON'T cite Wikipedia or other publicly generated web content. Read about citing Wikipedia or other web content.
6. IF you use a figure from someone else's paper, citing the reference in the figure caption is not good enough: you need to say explicitly that you copied it (i.e. "reprinted without permission from XYZ, 2019").

Citations

Citations are an important part of any scientific writing. They put your work in context, and show its relationship to other work. A big part of the power of a citation comes from its trustworthiness: the source is such that you have good reason to believe that a group of professional scientists has read and evaluated the paper, and so it contains mostly valid scientific results (although they may have made a mistake, but then it is up to you to find it!).

If you are talking about someone else's work, then you put a reference (properly formatted) to the work in a bibliographic section at the end of your paper, and cite the reference after you have discussed the work:

Carroll's use of poetry is an important part of his work, as it contextualizes and motivates the compositional aspects of the work (Carroll, 1871).

However, if you are directly quoting someone else's work (do this sparingly), then you need to enclose the text you are quoting in quotation marks, and put the reference, with a page number, immediately after the text you are quoting.

The poem opens with the line: "The sun was shining on the sea" (Carroll, 1871, p.72).

And, then, at the end of the document, you list the full reference. You do this also for any figures or pictures that are lifted directly from another work (see above under Academic Integrity).

Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. MacMillan, 1871.

Finally, if you are quoting a quote in a reference, you can either find the original source and cite that, or you can write:

The Walrus said: "I weep for you" (quoted in Carroll, 1871, p.73).

The actual format of the references will change depending on the journal or conference you are writing for. If you are using LaTeX, then you can simply change the bibliography style, see here for a guide to LaTeX sytles. If you're using Word™, then I question your sanity but nevertheless wish you the best of luck.

Wikipedia (or other publicly generated web content) is not a trustworthy source of information. Wikipedia entries can be generated by anyone, and may be left un-checked for months or years. Any references to Wikipedia in your submitted coursework for COGSCI600 will not be considered valid, and significant marks will be deducted. However, you may use Wikipedia to seek the original references, and cite those instead.

The only exception to the "don't cite Wikipedia" rule is if the content you are citing is specifically about Wikipedia itself. e.g. "In my research on the trustworthiness of Wikipedia, I found that there was a significant error on the page about cognitive science (reference to webpage and date of access)". In such cases, you must include the date that you accessed the content on and the exact URL.

Citations to works that are online only (not in print) are perfectly fine, but must include a journal name, volume number, and other relevant citation material, and/or a digital object identifier (DOI). You can also cite a web page from a well-established organisation, but you should include as much reference material as possible, e.g. an ISBN number or DOI, as well as the date of access

Wikipedia itself has a good page about citing Wikipedia.

Copyright © 2014 Jesse Hoey | Design by Andreas Viklund