Auxiliary Courses, Year 1 - Semester 1
Updated for 2020/2021: These units are suggested as possible options but do not form a closed list, being viable others from ULisboa, suggested by the students, provided they are relevant for the goals defined for the MA and validated by the Scientific Commission. These units are not exclusive for students of the Cognitive Science program and may have limited capacity, and be taught only in Portuguese. For timetables and further details, please check courses web pages or inquire the corresponding department. N.B.: The auxiliary course 1 is worth 6 ECTS.
Department of Philosophy
The students are expected to grasp and master a set of basic concepts, principles and techniques methods that are central to the following segments of modern formal logic: propositional logic, quantification theory and identity theory. We consider the following aspects of these logical theories: (a) the semantics for the logical constants involved therein – truth-functional sentence operators, quantifiers and the identity predicate – and a semantic notion of validity for the associated inferences; (b) the natural deduction rules – introduction and elimination rules – for those logical constants and a syntactic notion of validity for the associated inferences.
Department of Philosophy
The students are expected to grasp and master a set of concepts, theories, problems and arguments that are central to epistemology, either traditional or contemporary. With respect to the following topics, the course introduces the present state of their discussion by examining the main available views and discussing the main arguments for and against them: (a) the nature of knowledge; (b) varieties of knowledge; (c) the value of knowledge; (d) the nature of perception; (e) the existence and nature of a priori knowledge; (f) the skeptical challenge.
Department of Informatics
This course aims at providing students with the skills to program in an object-oriented language, Python, in a way that it can be used as a tool to program solutions to small yet everyday relevant problems.
Department of Mathematics
This is an introductory logic course. It focuses on the relation between formal languages and their interpretations. The aims are: 1) to introduce formal languages – via first-order languages – and discuss their syntax; (2) to interpret the formal languages (including the formalization of informal assertions) and to teach the deductive way of thinking (both formal and informal).
Department of Informatics
1. Fundamentals of machine learning; 2. Concept learning; 3. Tree models: decision trees; 4. Rule models: rule lists, rule sets; 5. Linear models: linear regression, perceptron and backpropagation; 6. Distance-based models: k-nearest neighbors classification, k-means and hierarchical clustering; 7. Probabilistic models: naive Bayes,; 8. Additional topics: feature construction and selection, model evaluation and selection, learning in imbalanced datasets, model ensembles; etc
Department of Biology
To know representative fossil species in human evolution. To understanding the anatomical changes during human evolution. To recognize the role of genetic environmental and cultural factors across human evolution. To identify skeletal bones. To relate bone morphology with sexual dimorphism, age and disease. To characterize stages of the human life cycle and postnatal growth. To identify the biological and environmental factors that regulates growth and maturation. To characterize the reproductive period and hormonal regulation. To make and interpret anthropometric measurements and indices considering international references. To explorer the influence of environmental factor and life styles on growth, nutritional status and menarche age. To understand differences of stages of the human life cycle across human evolution. To explore the biological changes and diseases prevalence with aging. To characterize the determinants of reproductive life span. To relate age and reproduction. To understand the influence of environmental factor and life styles on fertility/infertility. To explorer and discuss health disorders and biological and environmental factors.
Department of Biology
To understand cellular processes associated with energy production, allocation and detoxification in organisms facing stress. To use several parameters as biomarkers to evaluate health status of organisms exposed to stress. To know the ecological relevance of those biomarkers. To determine stressful conditions according to alterations observed in biomarkers. To practice technical skills and analysis of results To work independently and in groups
Faculty of Psychology, Prof. Leonel Garcia-Marques, garcia_marques@sapo.pt
Key contents: (1) Social Cognition and the formation of impression of personality; implicit personality theories; cognitive processes underlying impression formation. (2) Processes of integrating expectancy-incongruent information; differences in the perception of persons and groups; the discrepancy between pro-congruence effects and the incongruency effect. (3) False memories and the DREAM paradigm; false memories and impression formation; the extension of the DREAM paradigm to Social Cognition.
Faculty of Psychology
The course aims to promote critical and argumentative thinking regarding the scientific method and ethical and deontological issues associated with research in Psychology. The student is expected to acquire basic skills in planning, monitoring and communication of a scientific research.
Faculty of Psychology
The course approaches the following topics: nature and culture; organization and structure of society (kinship and economic organization); social control (political organization and forms of political power); collective representations (myths and mythologies; magic and religion; ritual systems).
Faculty of Psychology
The learning goals are: to develop critical reasoning and reflective thinking about the present cognitive research in the field of reading and visual word recognition; to promote analytic thinking and ability to interpret the results of research adopting behavioural experimental and neuroimaging techniques in the field of reading; to develop autonomous skills in research in cognitive science, especially in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, focusing in the study of the cognitive and neural processes underpinning visual word recognition.
Faculty of Psychology
Focuses on the cognitive approaches to inference processes (judgment under uncertainty, decision making and problem solving). It aims the development of a critical and updated view on the research in this area and requires conducting a research work on central themes of social inference.
Department of Linguistics
This curricular unit aims to provide the central foundations in current research in Syntax, in order to provide students with the understanding of the specialised literature and the development of their argumentative capacity in solving issues raised by linguistic data. Focusing on the interaction between theory and data analysis, a range of aspects considered central to syntactic theory are presented, which are applied to the analysis of a set of specific syntactic phenomena.
Department of Linguistics
This course provides an introduction to the study of meaning in natural languages, with emphasis on Portuguese. Students are expected to identify the key components of meaning at the sentence level and to understand how compositionality works, when constituents are combined. Some semantic systems will be analysed in greater detail. Our central concern will be to develop the students’ ability to analyse linguistic data, to describe relevant contrasts with adequate metalinguistic tools, to pinpoint grammatical anomalies and to discuss hypotheses for problematic issues.
Department of Linguistics
Knowledge: (i) properties of the lexicon of natural languages, its internal structure and its relationship to other components of the grammar; (ii) mental lexicon and lexical knowledge: history, development and usage (iii) critical appraisal of the following concepts: lexical unit, word, multi-word lexical units; (iv) properties of lexical units; (v) lexical relationships. Skills: analysis and description of the lexicon of natural languages and of Portuguese, in particular.
Departament of Linguistics
Evidence for prosodic domains. Morphology-phonology and syntax-phonology interface. Methods and experiments in the analysis of prosodic phenomena. Portuguese prosodic structure and its role in the grammar of the language: the syllable, the prosodic word, the phonological phrase and the intonational phrase. Prosody and meaning: the role of suprasegmentals and/or prosodic organization in lexical contrasts, prosodic disambiguation, sentence types, and discourse functions. Prosody in speech planning and processing; implicit prosody.
Faculty of Medicine
Intensive: 4-20 January; timetable: Tue, Wed, Thu 17-19h. Teacher Lia Neto (lianeto@medicina.ulisboa.pt)