Guest Lecturer: Cognitive Neuroscience Research Internship

Over the past year, I have served as a guest lecturer for the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Internship, which is a semester-long research internship aimed at getting undergraduate students from underrepresented minorities involved in cognitive neuroscience research, teaching them Python, and setting them up with connections for future research after the program is over.

In the fall of 2022, I guest lectured on moral judgment, introducing the students to one of my favorite papers by Phillips & Cushman (2017). In this paper, the authors find evidence that when under pressure, people have a tendency to erroneously identify immoral events as impossible, which has implications for counterfactual thinking more broadly. Additionally, we talked about the role of moral judgment in society, some theories about morality and moral judgment, as well as some fun and interesting cases like the Trolley Problem.

In the spring of 2023, I guest lectured again, but this time on the role of computational modeling and theory-building in psychology and neuroscience, using this excellent paper by Guest & Martin (2021) as a starting point. After talking abstractly about how modeling helps force theory-building, we got our hands dirty by specifying, implementing, and revising signal detection models in Python (code worksheet here). Although many students were completely new to the idea of computational modeling, working through the example themselves was a great way to highlight how modeling and hypothesis-testing is done in everyday scientific practice!