The curriculum in Cognitive Sciences offers students the opportunity to specialize either in cognitive psychology, with the use of experimental laboratory techniques, or in interaction psychology, refining qualitative analysis techniques for interaction systems.
The main topics and research areas of the Cognitive Sciences curriculum include:
- Attention
- Objects and action, affordances
- The role of the body in cognition, body awareness
- Language and perceptual, motor, and emotional systems
- Emotions and the sensorimotor system
- Numerical cognition and its relationship with embodied cognition
- Social cognition
- Multimodal analysis (verbal, gestural, proxemic, prosodic) of interaction systems
- Situated and distributed cognition in activity systems, both in everyday and institutional settings
- Discursive and communication psychology
Students will learn to conduct laboratory experiments, acquiring the skills to design, carry out, and analyze data. Students will be trained in classical behavioral techniques (such as error recording and reaction times) and in the use of eye-tracking technology.
They will also learn qualitative analysis techniques—such as ethnography and video analysis—applied to interaction systems, following methods from conversation analysis and multimodal interaction analysis.
PhD students will participate in monthly lab meetings, where they will have the opportunity to present and discuss ongoing research. Additionally, periodic meetings will be held to discuss key articles and relevant research topics.
The curriculum in Cognitive Sciences also encourages interdisciplinary projects that foster synergies with other disciplines in the curricula of Philosophy and Science Studies and Semiotics.