Tentative Course Offerings

COGS 87 (A00): How Minds and Groups Make Religion and Superstition | Professor Gedeon Deak

Why do humans, individually and in groups, attribute natural events to supernatural agents? How does the human brain accept religious beliefs, even in the face of contradictory evidence? We will examine how cognitive, developmental, and cultural factors work together to cause humans to believe in the supernatural.

COGS 193: Cognitive Science Career Seminar | Professor Amy Fox

Cognitive Science is a broad, interdisciplinary field that leverages massive amounts of unstructured, noisy, real-world data to advance our understanding of intelligence, human behavior, and the societies in which we’re embedded. It requires a broad education in mathematical and computational theory and methods, machine learning and artificial intelligence, human psychology, and a deep understanding of large-scale societal structures. With this breadth comes strength and advantage, but also feelings of uncertainty in an increasingly complex world.

This course provides students with an opportunity to hear from practicing cognitive scientists, all of whom are UC San Diego Cognitive Science alumni. Students will be able to engage with professionals in many domains to learn how their Cognitive Science education provided them with career advantages.

This course emphasizes career readiness, with a focus on practical training in professional skills, networking, and career development. The course concludes with the development of a career action plan to help students advance academic and career goals.

2 units, P/NP grade.  Meets Tuesdays 10:00am-11:50am at CSB 003.

Prerequisites: junior and senior standing.

DSGN 119: Design to Action - Building Innovation and Impact | Professor Nadir Weibel

Design@Large Winter 2026 centers on a simple but critical question: How does innovation actually get built—and sustained—in the real world?

This year’s series, Design to Action: Building Innovation and Impact, positions design not as a set of ideas or isolated projects, but as a practical method for turning possibility into action, momentum, and lasting systems. Across the quarter, the series makes visible the often-hidden work behind innovation: the decisions, relationships, tools, and structures that allow good ideas to take root and endure.

2 units, P/NP grade.  Meets Wednesdays 4:00pm-5:50pm at DIB 208.

Prerequisites: COMM 124A or COGS 10 or DSGN 1

COGS 87 (A00): How Minds & Cultures Make Religion & Superstition | Professor Gedeon Deak

Why do humans, individually and in groups, attribute natural events to supernatural agents? How does the human brain accept religious beliefs, even in the face of contradictory evidence? We will examine how cognitive, developmental, and cultural factors work together to cause humans to believe in the supernatural.

Cogs 90: Undergraduate Seminar - Sports Analytics Seminar | Professor Bradley Voytek

Sports analytics is a rapidly evolving, interdisciplinary field that applies data science, statistics, and computational modeling to understand and optimize performance, health, strategy, and engagement across athletic contexts. Modern sports analytics extends beyond traditional “Moneyball”-style performance metrics to include athlete health and injury prevention, biomechanics, neuroscience, mental health, organizational decision-making, and the analytics of sports media and entertainment.

This seminar introduces undergraduate students to the breadth of sports analytics through weekly guest lectures from practitioners and researchers working across these domains. Speakers will draw on real-world examples from professional and collegiate sports to illustrate how data-driven approaches are integrated with human expertise, ethical considerations, and domain knowledge. The seminar emphasizes exposure, exploration, and informed curiosity rather than technical mastery, providing students with a coherent view of sports analytics as both a scientific and societal enterprise.

1 unit, P/NP grade.  Meets Mondays 2:00pm-2:50pm at CSB 003.

COGS 160 (B00): Metabolic Health Analytics | Professor Mary Boyle

This course provides practical experience in analyzing health data using wearable technologies. Throughout the course, you will engage in activities that collect, process, analyze, and interpret various health metrics such as glucose levels, physical activity, sleep quality, and dietary habits.

Prerequisites: Cogs 163 or consent of instructor.

Class meet TuTh 9:30am-10:50am at Podem 1A18. Request enrollment via EASy.

COGS 160 (C00): Cinema and Cognitive Science | Professor Ayse Saygin

Although cinema is primarily a visual art, films engage our brains rapidly and effectively (sound, music, speech, facial expressions, body language, landscapes, cityscapes, interiors, text, narrative, temporal flow, etc); and as such this can be a great artistic medium to inform human perception and cognition. Indeed, both filmmakers and theoreticians have argued cinema may even be unique among the arts in providing natural and powerful access to human consciousness. This course will explore a variety of themes relevant to cognitive science in cinema, by exploring works of cinema. The main goal is to use films as a starting point for discussion of concepts and themes in cognitive science, though we will cover some background about cinema as well. Each week will feature a film, which students can view in their own time, along with primary concepts, themes, and questions related to cognitive science (e.g., consciousness, memory, AI...). Background for the main concepts for each film will be provided in lectures. Students will be expected to view and respond to the discussion questions about each film, as well as an engage in discussion with each others' points. 

Prerequisites: Cogs 1, Cogs 10, Cogs 17, or consent of instructor.

Class meet TuTh 12:30pm-1:50pm at COA 123. Request enrollment via EASy.

COGS 160 (D00): Space After Geometry | Professor Sergei Gepshtein

What is space? For the physicist, space is a single, continuous arena that contains every object in theUniverse. Yet the space you experience from moment to moment is not the same as the physicist’sspace. And thespaces used in the spatial professions: architecture andurban planning,filmmakingandgame design,theater directionand choreography, differ both from each other and from the spaces ofphysics or everyday experience.In this course, weexamine these different concepts of space and explore how they relate. Wefindthatthey form a spectrum: from the objective spaces of physics and neuroscience, to the experiential spacesof psychology and phenomenology, to the instrumental spaces of language andthe spatial arts, andfinally to the imaginary spaces of literature and poetics.

Prerequisites: Upper-division standing

Class meet TuTh 11:00am-12:20pm at COA B21. Request enrollment via EASy.