This one-semester course, which I teach at the Psychology Department of the II University of Naples, provides psychology students with an overview of Artificial Intelligence and an introduction to the use of computer simulation as a research tool for psychological research.
The course covers the following topics:
1. Computers in Psychology: the computer as a model and as a tool
2. "Rationalist" models of human intelligence: Classical Artificial Intelligence
3. Biological and artificial neural networks
4. The evolution of intelligence in biological and artificial systems
5. Embodied intelligence: robots and the environment
6. Conflict and cooperation: social intelligence
7. The challenge of complexity: intelligence as an emergent property of Complex Adaptive Systems
8. Philosophical problems of intelligence: the mind and the body, human and animal intelligence, consciousness and the unconscious
Caserta Café is an online workshop on the Java Programming Language which I have designed for psychology students who are interested in doing experimental work in our new Artificial Life Laboratory.