The Psychological and Brain Sciences Department applies scientific approaches to understanding sensation, motivation, perception, cognition, language, development, personality, psychological disorders, and social behavior. As a collective, we deploy techniques that capture processes at the level of the gene, the cell, the brain, the individual organism, and the group.
Students in °IJʿ’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences explore provocative and important questions at multiple levels-of-analysis; from brain to behavior and everything in between. The following are some examples of the questions they ask:
- How plastic is the nervous system; how does it develop and what experiences change it?
- Does gesture train the brain for language learning and intercultural understanding?
- How can we conquer biases and prejudices we don’t know we have?
- How can we miss seeing what is right in front of us?
- Are relationships literally good for the heart?
- Is the clock of development preordained by genes?
- Why are some people resilient to misfortune and others vulnerable to life’s stresses and bad habits?
- What pleasures our brains as we behold great art?
Join the effort to deploy a broad array of empirical methodologies and tools to answer these questions. The department emphasizes undergraduate research, offering world-class faculty and facilities, the challenge to conduct and write a senior thesis, and the ability to explore personal interests through credit-bearing, self-designed independent study.
