SCXT 350

Term Paper/Project

In the term paper/project, you are invited to either dig down into one of the disciplines that make up cognitive science, or to make a connection between two or more disciplines that addresses an area of interest within cognitive science. You might, for example, consider the philosophical underpinnings of the discipline (or consider some of the issues raised by critics of the discipline). You might look at the relationship between memory as Psychology views it and the various models of either symbolic or connectionist AI. You could work to develop a definition of cognitive science, comparing and contrasting differing views. If your interest is more "nuts and bolts", you could do a project of some sort - Lisp is available for programming exercises, Prolog and SNePS are available for projects in knowledge representation, and CLIPS is available for project in expert systems. It is my intention that the type of project be fairly open, so long as you can argue that it is substantially and significantly about cognitive science.

Let's use the following for a draft schedule:

• Monday, Oct. 9: Discussion of paper/project
• Tuesday, Oct. 17: Paper/project proposals due. I will return them by the following Friday.
• Monday, Oct. 30: Paper/project bibliography due.
• Monday, Nov. 20:  First draft due
• Wednesday, Dec. 6, 5:00 PM. All materials due.

Papers should be at least 10 pages in length and supported by a substantial bibliography (5 - 10 items, of which only a small number can be web references). Projects also need a bibliography (though probably a smaller one), and should include a shorter paper giving

• The goal of the project
• Supporting reading
• How the goals were achieved by the code
• An evaluation of the project

Please note that substantial penalities will be assessed for missed deadlines for the paper. Milestones will be assessed as follows:

• Proposal: 5 pts.
• Bibliography: 10 pts.
• First Draft: 10 pts.

Any questions? Please ask!