Professor Kevin N. Dunbar, Ph.D.
Teaching and Courses
"I have a passionate commitment to teaching and I regard it as an essential component of the intellectual life and vibrancy of any university. I look forward to teaching my courses and eagerly supervise undergraduate research projects."
- Dr. Kevin N. Dunbar on teaching
Psychology and Scientific Mind: PSYC84
Science surrounds us. From the moment you wake up you are bombarded with ipods, vitamins, medicines, global warming, and traffic: All the products of science. Even reading the label on a bottle of water is a scientific task in which we explore a labyrinth of information, but do we understand what is on the label? In psychology you are bombarded with theories of perception, cognition, mental health, brain function, cell function, social interactions and neurotransmitters. What is all this stuff? Is there something special about science and scientific thinking? The goal of this course is to answer these questions. There are two main types of students who will be taking this course: Students who are specialists in Psychology and Students who are majoring or minoring in a science (e.g., Biology, Chemistry, Physics, or Neuroscience). Students with either of these backgrounds are expected to know the ways that scientific experiments and theories are conceived, analyzed, and evaluated. Here we will probe the cognitive, social, and cultural factors that underlie these activities. Other goals of the course are to answer questions such as: What is science? Is there such a thing as the scientific method? How do scientists make discoveries? Are there differences between women and men scientists and are they important? How is science learned and taught; is it just a list of facts or are there similar concepts to those learned in music, politics, art, and literature? Is the human mind/brain wired for science? What is the media’s role in science and science education? How do science and culture interact? When does science go wrong, when do non-scientists go wrong. We will explore these topics by probing psychological issues in contemporary science, education, and culture.
Creativity, Reasoning and Problem Solving: PSYD56
What is the creative mind? What makes a great problem solver and how do these amazing abilities arise? Are there circumstances that make people more or less creative, or are people born this way? In this course we will explore these issues in a highly interactive, and hopefully creative way.
Advanced Topic in Cognition: Cognition, Health, Culture, and Evolution: PSYD57
In this seminar we will investigate the ways that cognition and culture interact to produce modes of thinking that have important effects on every aspect of our behavior, particularly decisions about health, food, and the environment. How do we understand, explain, and predict people’s behavior in such diverse contexts? We will begin by investigating the cognitive abilities that people are born with. These are universal cross cultural knowledge representations of biology, physics, number, language, and social relations. Then, we will explore the ways that people represent this “core” knowledge, the schemas, mental models and frames that are changed adapted and interpreted by different cultures in different ways. We have a conundrum: How can people born with innate predispositions have varied social, cultural and cognitive practices. Our goal here is to propose general mechanisms that culture and cognition use to shape our views of the world. The major issue is how can genes and environment interact to produce cultural universals and cognitive diversity. By the end of the course we should see how this is possible.
Dr. Dunbar also serves as an advisor for theses, independent studies, graduate students and post-doctoral research. Check the Join us page for further information.
