Course material for NACS 645: Introduction to Cognitive Science (Fall 2025) at the University of Maryland. Sessions covered: Social cognition 1 (cooperation), Social cognition 2 (origins), Social cognition 3 (moral technologies), Social cognition 4 (neural need to infer others).

Required readings:

Rand, D., & Nowak, M. A. (2013). Human cooperation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 413-425.
Tan, J., Ariely, D., & Hare, B. (2017). Bonobos respond prosocially toward members of other groups. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 1-11.
Bettle, R., & Rosati, A. G. (2021). The primate origins of human social cognition. Language Learning and Development, 17, 1-18.
de Villiers, J. G., & de Villiers, P. A. (2014). The role of language in theory of mind development. Topics in Language Disorders, 34(4), 313-328.
Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248.
Curry, O. S., Mullins, D. A., & Whitehouse, H. (2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. Current Anthropology, 60(1), 47-69.
Gächter, S., Molleman, L., & Nosenzo, D. (2025). Why people follow rules. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-13.
Koster-Hale, J., & Saxe, R. (2013). Theory of mind: A neural prediction problem. Neuron, 79(5), 836-848.
Joiner, J., Piva, M., Turrin, C., & Chang, S. W. (2017). Social learning through prediction error in the brain. NPJ Science of Learning, 2, 8.

The material is provided below as a single PDF.

Open or download the course PDF