1st Year - 2nd Semester
To be selected for each student in order to extend his background to areas he did not get acquainted with during his graduation degree. See list here.
Cognitive Psychology
Coordinator Ana Luísa Raposo, Faculdade de Psicologia
This subject offers advanced training in experimental psychology, and particularly in the method and theories of cognitive psychology. The subject will extend students basic knowledge of cognitive psychology and will provide an in-depth coverage of key research problems in areas such as memory, language, perception and social cognition. Different areas and research problems will be taught in a given year.
Philosophy of Mind, Language and Cognition
Coordinator João Branquinho, Departamento de Filosofia, Faculdade de Letras, Centro de Filosofia
This course introduces a set of notions, problems and views that are central to
philosophical reflection about the nature of the human mind and cognition. Among the foundational issues examined in the course are the following ones.
(a) The correct typology for mental phenomena, especially the usual distinction between cognitive mental states, or propositional attitudes, and conscious states, or experiences.
(b) The constitutive marks of mentality, especially intentionality, phenomenology and self-awareness.
(c) The pros and cons of the most prominent views about the nature and structure of the mind: Dualism (both Cartesian Dualism and Property Dualism);
Analytical Behaviorism; Physicalism (both Type-Type Physicalism and Token-Token Physicalism); Functionalism (both Machine Functionalism and Analytical Functionalism).
(d) The nature and workings of psychophysical causation, including mind-world causation, world-mind causation and mind-mind causation.
e) The relations between language and thought, especially the issue of whether thought is possible without language and the issue of whether thought is possible in non human animals.
Technology of Language
Coordinator António Branco, Departamento de Informática, Faculdade de Ciências
This course aims at introducing central aspects of the computational processing of natural language and its applications. Representation and computation of linguistic knowledge. Syntactic analysis methodologies. Overgeneration and selection of results. Syntax-semantics interface. Semantic representation and logical form. Grammar models. Interfaces with speech and cognition.
This course presents basic issues in computation theory - computation models, computability, and complexity. Several models of computation, of growing computational power, are presented, and it is pointed out that no model is known that has more computational power than Turing machines (Church-Turing thesis). Problems are presented that are not computable, that is, that no computer can solve no matter how much time/space resources it uses. In what concerns complexity issues, computable problems are classified according to the time/space resources that are needed to solve them. Problems exist that, although computable, are impossible to solve due to the huge amount of resources needed for their resolution.