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Societies
American Association for Artificial Intelligence
- “advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines.”
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
- “understanding the nature, function, and underlying mechanisms of consciousness”
Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science
- Advancing Canadian research in experimental psychology and behavioural neuroscience.
- All-purpose online resource for Cognitive Science
- The premiere society for bringing together disciplines to understand the nature of the human mind.
The Society for Philosophy and Psychology
- promoting “interaction between philosophers, psychologists and other cognitive scientists on issues of common concern”
Programs
Demos
- A startling collection of original illusions, with beautiful examples of anomalous motion, variations on the cafe wall illusion, visual phantoms, and much more.
- Brain Tutor is a free application for MacOS X and Windows for practicing surfing an fMRI brain volume, and familiarizing yourself with brain anatomy. Brain Voyager, their flagship product, is one of the most important tools for doing analysis of fMRI data.
Change Blindness Videos by Ron Rensink
- Video clips for change-detection experiments. You’ll be surprised at how much can be changed without anyone noticing. Warning: these videos use a flicker effect and may be unsuitable for epileptics.
- Video clips for change-detection experiments. You’ll be surprised at how much can be changed without anyone noticing.
- A web version of the original computer therapist program.
Plumb Design Online Visual Thesaurus
- A very sophisticated demonstration program of a visualization engine called ThinkMap, which uses the WordNet database to graphically show semantic relationships between words.
- Pointers to a partial port of Terry Winograd’s famous Blocks-world program.
- The effect of removing all but the most global resonances of speech.
- The influence of context on colour perception.
- A neural net package, freely downloadable, often used for teaching. This is the software used in the Oxford Summer School in Connectionist Modelling.
- After prolonged viewing at dynamic noise, you look at a stationary image. Surprisingly, the previously unadapted portion of the image appears to move for several seconds. Moreover, this illusory motion looks jittery in random directions, as if mimicking small eye movements of fixation.
Tutorials
- Part of a very nice introduction to the Goldman equation, which models ion flow over a cell membrane.
- Simple explanations of neuroscience techniques.
- An interactive WWW-based program by Henry Rogers and Michael Stairs to refine your ability to do phonetic transcription in English.
The Sounds of English and Spanish
- Animations of the vocal tracts, plus video of speakers pronouncing every phoneme in both English and Spanish. A really great place to begin with phonetics.
Tutis Vilis’s Physiology of the Senses
- A depiction of sensory physiology using flash animation.
WebVision: The Organization of the Retina and the Visual System
- An in-depth presentation of retinal and visual physiology, which attempts, with real success (and many animations and diagrams) to present cutting-edge research in a way that non-experts can understand.
Tools
- Phonetic font for both Macintosh (PostScript and TrueType) and Windows (TrueType) by Henry Rogers which allows you to type ordinary text without having to shift between two different fonts.
- A very sophisticated (and free) research-grade neural net package
- Praat is one of the standard tools for doing research in acoustic phonetics and has a variety of applications in other forms of acoustic analysis and psycholinguistics. Praat is free, programmable, has built-in feed-forward neural nets, and is, among other things, useful for producing spectrographs, cepstrums, pitch extractions, experimenting with speech synthesis, and creating discrimination experiments.
- A web-based resource library of images and presentation material illuminating the study of visual perception.
- Powerful visual stimulus generation package for vision researchers, easily programmable in Python.
- A highly accessible and widely-used database of words and their relations.
Reference
- A detailed history and explanation of writing systems.
Comparative Mammalian Brain Collections
- You can see and download photographs of brains (stained and sectioned) of over 100 different species of mammals (including humans) representing 17 mammalian orders. One of the world’s largest collections of mammalian brains.
Intellectual Currents of the 20th Century
- A concise analysis of the important philosophical movements of the 20th Century
REP (The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online)
- One of the standard philosophical reference works in electronic form. Thorough and authoritative, bringing in philosophical points of view from many philosophical traditions. You need to be on-campus or have a Carleton ID to access this resource.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
- Carleton has a full online subscription to the OED. The OED is the most comprehensive dictionary of any language in the world. It contains, for every word in the English language, numerous sample citations of that word in use in different historical periods, starting with the first known usage in the language. Although this facility is not available here, with the right software, it is also possible to write programs using their ‘pat’ tool to pull out very specific kinds of corpuses from the OED to use in linguistic research.
Courses
Anatomical Foundations of Neuroscience
- Online course notes from the University of Western Ontario (including instructions on dissecting a brain)
Inquiry in the Cognitive Sciences
- A web-based 2nd-year course at Washingon U.
- Online course notes from the University of Western Ontario
Reith Lectures 2003 — V.S. Ramachandran
- Transcripts and RealAudio of five talks Ramachandran did for the BBC Reith lecture series
Summer Institutes
Oxford Summer School in Connectionist Modelling
Systems Biology Dynamics: from Genes to Organisms (McGill)
- Each lecture explores the concepts and basic mathematical ideas of a different strand of Systems Biology and will be illustrated with examples from recently published research. Participants will develop a set of tools and a vocabulary which should allow them to discuss and become actively involved in any problem in quantitative biology. They will become familiar with the powerful Matlab programming language as well as the (free) xpp software package.
UQAM Summer Institute in Cognitive Science
Being an Academic
Creating Effective Posters for Psychology Conferences
- Diana DeStefano, graduate of the Carleton Cognitive Science PhD program, has a primer on poster presentation.
Survival Skills for Young Neuroscientists
- Deals with a lot of the practical issues of being a young academic: where to publish, how to determine authorship, tips for putting posters together.
Tutis Vilis’s Survival Skills for Graduate Students
Literature Searching
Carleton University Library Catalogue
- Search for books and journals in the Carleton University Library system. If the university subscribes to an online version of the journal, the catalogue will display a link to it. If a journal you are interested in is not available anywhere in the library system, Carleton subscribes to both CISTI and Ingenta (see below).
- Includes psycINFO and the Philosopher’s Index. You need to be on-campus or have a Carleton ID to access this resource.
Electronic journals at Carleton
- Pointers to all of the academic journals to which Carleton has full text electronic subscriptions.
- One of the premier search tools for literature in the sciences and social sciences. A very nice feature is the ability to list papers that cite the paper you are currently investigating. You need to be on-campus or have a Carleton ID to access this resource.
- Carleton has an arrangement with the National Research Council to give us access to their comprehensive set of science journals. For any journal they have which is not in the Carleton system, as a graduate student you can have a photocopy sent to your on-campus mailbox. You need to apply for access in the library, and get training in how to use the system. Well worth it. See Survival Guide for more information.
- Ingenta is a service which provides access to journal articles (both sciences and humanities) for journals for which Carleton has neither a print nor electronic subscription. For any journal they have which is not in the Carleton system, as a graduate student you can have a photocopy sent to your on-campus mailbox. You need to apply for access in the library, and get training in how to use the system. Well worth it. See Survival Guide for more information.
- Full text of all MIT Press books and journals — Carleton has a full subscription. This link is to the subscribed service. You need to be on-campus or have a Carleton ID to access this resource.
- Full text of the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science — included in Carleton’s subscription to CogNet. You need to be on-campus or have a Carleton ID to access this resource.
- RACER allows you to search all Ontario libraries at once for books not available in the Carleton University library system, and automatically and electronically put in a request for an Interlibrary loan. You must register with your Carleton ID the first time you use the system.
Video and Film Services at Carleton (IMS)
- Over 8,000 videos and films locally in nearly all disciplines, with access to 50,000 more from across Ontario available for classroom booking.