HI 5302 Cognitive Science in Health Informatics

This course is an introduction to cognitive science--the interdisciplinary study of mind and behavior from an information processing perspective--and its application to health informatics. The course begins with a basic introduction to human cognition and information processing (both symbolic and connectionist). It then presents a broad survey of the health informatics areas to which cognitive science has been applied. These areas include health problem solving and education, decision support systems, user-centered interfaces, and the design and use of controlled medical terminologies.

Course Objectives

• Compare the major approaches to the study of mind and behavior.
• Understand current theories of human cognition.
• Compare different experimental techniques for studying human cognition.
• Understand how cognitive theories are used to produce cognitive tools, decision-support tools, tutoring       systems, and to improve education.
• Analyze devices from a human factors perspective so as to identify good and bad user interfaces.
• Use a variety of computational mechanisms to express and implement information processing theories. 

Topics 

• The Classical View   
• The Connectionist View of Information
• Connectionist Processing
• The Computational Level
• Connectionist
• Processing, and Hebbian Learning
• The Algorithmic
• Computational Level
• Reasoning with Uncertainty
• Bayesian Networks
• Advanced Topics in Bayesian Networks
• Influence Diagrams

Prerequisites

Consent of the instructor, highspeed connection to the internet, personal computer.

Additional Information