Course material for NACS 645: Introduction to Cognitive Science (Fall 2025) at the University of Maryland. Sessions covered: Thinking 1 (two systems to decide), Thinking 2 (model-free vs model-based), Thinking 3 (collective knowledge).

Required readings:

Evans, J. St B. T. (2003). In two minds: dual-process accounts of reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 454-459.
Melnikoff, D. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2018). The mythical number two. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(4), 280-293.
Daw, N. D., Niv, Y., & Dayan, P. (2005). Uncertainty-based competition between prefrontal and dorsolateral striatal systems for behavioral control. Nature neuroscience, 8(12), 1704-1711.
Collins, A. G., & Cockburn, J. (2020). Beyond dichotomies in reinforcement learning. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 21(10), 576-586
Navajas, J., Niella, T., Garbulsky, G., Bahrami, B., & Sigman, M. (2018). Aggregated knowledge from a small number of debates outperforms the wisdom of large crowds. Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 126-132.
Rabb, N., Fernbach, P. M., & Sloman, S. A. (2019). Individual representation in a community of knowledge. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23, 891-902.

The material is provided below as a single PDF.

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