The conundrum of how to get undergraduate students to pursue graduate studies in a field that they don’t know even exists forced me to examine what I was doing in the classroom to make students aware of and interested in pursuing graduate work in cognitive science. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary area that draws together researchers from disciplines like anthropology, computer science, education, engineering, informatics, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and speech-language-hearing sciences to investigate questions about the mind, brain, and behavior. Many universities in the US and around the world have formal cognitive science programs that provide the kind of cross-disciplinary training that will enable future scientists to integrate the individual puzzle pieces we are discovering now and to understand how the parts interact with each other to form a complex, working whole. Although there are several cross-disciplinary programs of study at KU (e.g., child language, gerontology, neuroscience), these training programs are for graduate students, not undergraduates. It wasn’t clear to me how undergraduate students would decide to pursue their education as graduate students on the cutting edge of the cognitive sciences if, when they were undergraduates, they didn’t know that such a field existed.
The examination of my own classroom habits resulted in a very disappointing discovery: despite being someone who received this sort of cross-disciplinary training myself, I wasn’t “preaching” what I was “practicing.” Even though I employ a variety of methodologies and draw from several different approaches in my own research on spoken language, I found that I wasn’t really incorporating that methodological variety or even cultivating an appreciation for the diversity of methods that I employed in my own work in the students that I was teaching in PSYC 104, General Psychology. It was about this time that I first discovered Thematic Learning Communities (TLCs) at KU, and wondered if I might be able to use the TLC experience to get undergraduate students interested in cognitive science.
Making connections
In most TLCs at KU, a group of first-year students enroll together in two courses that address a broader theme or idea. The connection between the courses is elaborated on in one hour seminar through discussions, field trips, guest speakers and other extracurricular activities that don’t readily fit into the classroom. Many TLCs give students who are already interested in a specific major an exposure to issues that might not be addressed in the more traditional curriculum. For example, pre- business majors might enroll in courses paired together in the TLC entitled Brazil: Business and Society to learn about the language and culture of what is predicted to be one of the largest markets of the future. Pre-law students in the Law and Society TLC learn how various court rulings have affected society and how society has influenced the legal system. Engineering students in The Leading Edge TLC might consider moral and ethical implications of something they might build rather than just how to build it. It was obvious that the TLC experience helped freshmen see their first semester as something more than the semester they were enrolled in course X, or fulfilled requirement Z. It helped orient students to the concept of “general education” by exposing them to important issues with implications that reached beyond the one course in which they learned about that issue.
I wondered, however, if a TLC could also inspire first-year students to become scientific leaders in the future who would use a variety of methodological approaches to understand several levels of a problem, who would take theoretical inspiration from many fields, and who would work with researchers from other domains to solve a problem rather than become a psychologist, computer scientist, physicist, or some other “-ist” who would examine only one piece of a significantly larger puzzle. Could the seeds of crossdisciplinary research be planted in the fresh, fertile minds of first year students, take hold in a few students here and there, and blossom into a new breed of researcher in the future?
To increase undergraduate students’ exposure to cognitive science, I worked with Linda Dixon in the Thematic Learning Community Office to develop the Mind, Brain, and Behavior TLC. In this TLC, first-year students enroll in PSYC 104, General Psychology (with me as the instructor), a one-hour bridging seminar, and one other introductory level course from the other disciplines that traditionally comprise the cognitive sciences: anthropology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, or speech-language-hearing.
During the bridging seminar, we visited different laboratories across campus, including the Developmental Neurolinguistics Lab directed by Mabel Rice in SPLH where we learned how an electroencephalograph—a device that measures tiny electrical potentials on the scalp produced by the “firing” of cells in the brain called neurons—could be used to obtain precise measures of how and when spoken language is comprehended. In another seminar I brought in an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), a computer program that mimics how the human brain processes information. The brain consists of many simple, highly interconnected cells (neurons) that produce different patterns of electrical activity (which can be measured by an electroencephalograph) to give us our conscious experiences. Like the brain, an ANN is a computer program comprised of many simple yet highly interconnected units that process information. These programs have been used to model and better understand various cognitive processes.
In other seminars I showed videotapes of individuals with various neurological disorders to give TLC students a better idea of what it might be like to have sustained damage to part of their brain involved in short-term memory or in recognizing faces of people they know. Guest speakers also visited the seminar to talk about their work examining how children learn language or of studies employing functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify which part of the brain is involved in performing a given cognitive process. In Fall 2004, students also went to the Lied Center for the Humanities Lecture Series presentation by Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University.
Through these experiences— some of which could not have been done in a traditional classroom— TLC students were able to see that something they learned in one class actually can apply to another. More importantly, they were exposed to core disciplines of cognitive science and developed an appreciation of how big the questions are that scientists study; only with cooperation among scientists from many disciplines could these questions be answered.
In my most recent TLC class, I wanted to more explicitly show relationships among different disciplines of cognitive science and, more broadly, relationships among other KU courses, between the classroom and the real world, and between theory and practice. To help illustrate how everything is connected, in the seminar we spent part of the semester reading the book Linked: The new science of networks, by Albert-László Barabási. In Linked, Barabási describes how networks consisting of nodes and links can be used to help us understand the underlying structure that exists among numerous, interacting entities. Nodes in the networks represent individual entities, perhaps people, cities, or countries, and links connect two nodes if they are related in some fashion, perhaps people who know each other, cities that have airline flights between them, or countries that engage in economic trade. Different types of structures that emerge from interactions among entities have significant implications for the efficiency and stability of the underlying system.
During one of the seminars I illustrated how this so-called new science of networks— populated primarily by physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers—influenced my own psychological research on language processing and resulted in several new discoveries in my lab. Words stored in memory are linked together in an elaborate and stable network, much like networks that characterize airline travel and other complex systems in the real world. By using these mathematical techniques, we can better describe how the words we know are organized in that part of memory we call the mental lexicon. Seeing that mathematics had something important to say about psychology also helped TLC students discover that there could (and should) be connections among the other classes they will enroll in while at KU, not just among courses that constitute the cognitive sciences. By making connections explicit among concepts, theories, or, more broadly speaking, other courses in the university, these students could now use that framework as a model to help them discover other relationships and to build their own efficient and stable knowledge structures.
Encouraging signs
Although I’ve planted the seeds for cognitive science over the past few years in several cohorts through the Mind, Brain, and Behavior TLC, it is still too early to point to a mature, new breed of researcher. However, I am encouraged knowing that these ideas have taken hold in a few students. Two previous MBB students are currently participating in the KU BioSciences Initiative, a federally funded program that promotes diversity in biomedical research. One student is mentored by Holly Storkel in SPLH, the other by Monica Biernat in psychology, and both are working on honors theses for their programs. Another former MBB student has worked in my lab the past three years (most students don’t become involved in research experiences until their senior year) and is now completing an honors thesis in psychology. I have also run into other TLC students at faculty colloquy and the Undergraduate Research Symposium. Granted, it is difficult to know if the experiences these students had in the TLC caused them to pursue these additional experiences in the first place, or to pursue them earlier than they might have otherwise, but the nurturing environment provided by the TLC program certainly couldn’t have hurt. I hope the Mind, Brain, and Behavior and other TLCs, like Women in Science, can continue to nourish the minds of our firstyear students and help many more blossom and mature.
For more on Thematic Learning Communities at KU, see http://www.tlc.ku.edu.
