Achievement

A new course was created, Formal Methods in Cognitive Science: Inference. This course complements the two other Formal Methods courses in the training program, providing trainees with background in probability theory and statistics, maximum likelihood inference, Bayesian inference, and hierarchical probabilistic models. The methods covered in this course are of growing importance to cognitive modeling across many empirical domains, including language, vision, and cognitive development. In addition to learning the mathematical foundations of these methods and their application to cognition, students in the course implement inferential techniques in modern programming languages (e.g., R, Python) and analyze real-world data sets. This new course fills a hole in the training program by providing knowledge and hands-on experience with probabilistic inference as it is used in cognitive science and related fields.