Teaching
Courses at St. Olaf College
PSYCH 238 Biopsychology
Fall 2025, Fall 2026
How the nervous system produces behavior, from neurons and synapses through sensation, movement, sleep, stress, and attention. Topics are organized around three frames: evolution, development, and homeostasis. Each student writes a report on a brain area of their choice and presents it at an end-of-semester poster session.
PSYCH 390 Electrophysiology of Complex Cognition: EEG Methods and Analysis
Spring 2026, Fall 2026
A seminar on EEG and event-related potentials. Tuesday sessions are student-led discussions of ERP components; Thursday sessions are MATLAB labs in which students process EEG with EEGLAB and ERPLAB, from raw data to measured components. For the final project each student analyzes one component from the ERP CORE dataset and presents the full analysis.
Fall 2026 syllabus (PDF) · ERP Peak Detective, a lab activity from this course in SERC’s Teaching Computation collection
PSYCH 290 A Big History of the Brain
January Term 2026, January Term 2027
The evolution of nervous systems and the history of neuroscience. Students build timelines in Mathematica and finish with a gallery walk on the setting and working routines of a historical figure in neuroscience. The course counts toward the History concentration.
PSYCH 237 Cognitive Psychology
Spring 2026, Spring 2027
Perception, attention, memory, language, and reasoning. In Spring 2026 the course moved from a textbook to primary research articles.
Teaching Materials
- Digital Concepts: interactive diagrams for neuroscience and EEG teaching.
- The ERP Pipeline: eleven interactive pages on the ERP data analysis pipeline, used in PSYCH 390.
- Intro to MATLAB: eight interactive lessons on MATLAB basics for EEGLAB.
- ERP Peak Detective: an introduction to ERP analysis in MATLAB, peer reviewed and published in the Science Education Resource Center’s Teaching Computation collection (Carleton College).