Student Resources

Can brain science help business? At first blush, this might seem like a bridge too far. After all, the efficiencies of the market virtually guarantee accurate asset pricing, marketing research and focus groups can test the efficacy of advertising, effective leadership can stimulate innovation and productivity, and sophisticated analytics can leverage big data to improve organizational structure to maximize return on investment. A deeper look, however, provokes the idea that brain science has enormous potential to inform business. We now know the basic architecture of the decision process in the human brain, from identification of choice options to the calculation of their utility, to selecting one for consumption, and learning from this experience. We are also beginning to understand how fundamental economic principles like risk, ambiguity, and volatility shape these processes, and why these factors seem to influence different people in different ways and in different choice contexts. Importantly, neuroscience provides a powerful tool for understanding the private reasons, such as emotional responses or the influence of others, people make the choices they do- reasons they themselves may not be aware of or even understand. Brain science offers the potential to unlock the mechanisms underlying what many people consider to be the keys to the future of business, including creativity and innovation, empathy and connecting with others, social awareness and the common good, how people use information to guide decision making, and the experience and impact of online vs. live interaction and pedagogy. New developments, including biometrics, implantable and wearable brain interfaces, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and the human microbiome, offer the opportunity for enhanced precision not only in marketing and finance, but also in the talent identification and the development of full human potential.

Full Semester Course 1.0 cu, Spring 2023

Instructors: Elizabeth Johnson & Barbara Kahn

As consumers, we are constantly exposed to advertisements and experience visual messages from product packages in stores, retail displays, and products already owned. In essence, visual marketing collateral is omnipresent and is an essential part of corporate visual identity, strategy, and communication. Some of this falls to creative graphic design, but advertising, design, and marketing can also be significantly enhanced by knowledge of how visual information and its presentation context can be optimized to deliver desirable and advantageous messages and experiences. This course will emphasize how to measure, interpret, and optimize visual marketing, and will provide an overview of visual perception and visual cognition, eye movements, and attention, and their role and influence on consumer memory, persuasion, choice, and other behaviors.

This course will have a term project collaboration with Unilever on a real marketing problem that can be solved through visual marketing strategies, and representatives of Unilever will be participating in this aspect of the class.

Half Semester Course 0.5 cu, next course offering Fall, 2022 (Quarter 2)

Instructor: Gideon Nave

Basic neuroscience made steady progress throughout the 20th century with only small areas of application outside of medicine. Over the past 30 years, however, breakthroughs in measurement and computation have accelerated basic research and created major applications for business and technology. Currently, applications to marketing research and product development are experiencing explosive growth that has been met with both excitement and skepticism. This mini-course provides an overview of these developments. The course follows a straightforward theory/application format for each major area of cognitive neuroscience. On Tuesdays, the basics of neuroscience are covered along with a few illustrative applications. A key take-away from this part of the course is to gain the elementary scientific knowledge that is necessary to separate “neuro-reality” from “neuro-hype.” On Thursdays, we cover application areas in greater detail. There are two general types of applications. First, there are applications of neuroscience in marketing research. Topics will range from well-known and widely used applications, such as eye-tracking measures in the lab and the field, to emerging methods and measures, such as mobile EEG, face reading algorithms, and fMRI predictors of market response.

Application areas include, packaging and shelf display, copy testing for television and print advertisements, video games, product usability studies, and simulators. Second, there are applications of neuroscience in the development of new products. Product development applications including wearable physiological devices and apps, sensory branding for foods and fragrances, pharmaceuticals and medical devices (especially prosthetic devices), and neuroscience-based “edutainment” designed to enhance cognitive functions. Special attention will also be paid to changes in brain anatomy and function over the lifespan. Key markets are children (mainly for enhancement products), seniors (mainly for remediation/restoration products), and working adults (both enhancement and remediation/restoration products). This course is self-contained and has no prerequisites. That said, students with some background in business, industrial design, psychology, or neuroscience are likely to find the material covered in this course complementary to the knowledge they already have.

New developments in neuroscience, as well as biometrics, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and the human microbiome, offer the opportunity for enhanced precision not only in marketing and finance, but also in the identification of talent, enhancement of performance, and development of full human potential.

Instructor: Edward Royzman

Fall 2022

Thinking, judgment, and personal and societal decision making, with emphasis on fallacies and biases.

Prerequisite(s): One semester of statistics OR microeconomics

Instructor: Sudeep Bhatia 

Fall 2022

Our understanding of markets, governments, and societies rests on our understanding of choice behavior, and the psychological forces that govern it. This course will introduce the study of choice, and will examine in detail what we know about how people make choices, and how we can influence these choices. It will utilize insights from psychology and economics, and will apply these to domains including risky decision making, inter temporal decision making, and social decision making.

Prerequisite(s): Microeconomics and PSYC 001

Instructor: Joseph Kable

Spring 2023

This seminar reviews recent research that combines psychological, economic, and neuroscientific approaches to study human and animal decision-making. The course focuses on our current state of knowledge regarding the neuroscience of decision-making, and how evidence concerning the neural processes associated with choices might be used to constrain or advance economic and psychological theories of decision-making. Topics covered will include decisions involving risk and uncertainty, decisions that involve learning from experience, decisions in strategic interactions and games, and social preferences.

Prerequisite(s):  Psychology 1490, 1530, or 1650, or permission of the instructor.

Instructors: Angela Duckworth 

Sabbatical for 2022/2023 Academic School Year

This advanced seminar will expose students to cutting-edge research from psychology and economics on the most effective strategies for changing behavior for the better (e.g., promoting healthier eating and exercise, encouraging better study habits, and increasing savings rates). The weekly readings cover classic and current research in this area. For each topic we will cover, articles have been carefully chosen, and we will discuss those in detail. The goal is to help students develop the skill of reading and critiquing an academic paper. We will therefore have student led discussions of papers and required summaries. The target audience for this course is advanced undergraduate students interested in behavioral science research and particularly those hoping to learn about using social science to make a positive social impact. We will focus primarily on the applications of behavioral science to improving health, education and financial outcomes.

Admission to this course is by application only. Please complete the application form to be considered for admission: https://tinyurl.com/penn-bcfg-seminar

Instructor: Xuanming Su

Fall 2022

This course is an intensive introduction to various scientific perspectives on the processes through which people make decisions. Perspectives covered include cognitive psychology of human problem-solving, judgment and choice, theories of rational judgment and decision, and the mathematical theory of games. Much of the material is technically rigorous. Prior or current enrollment in STAT 101 or the equivalent, although not required, is strongly recommended.

Instructor: Brian Litt

Spring 2023

Brian Litt, MD, and guest lecturers with “real-world” experience in designing and developing implantable medical devices in research and industry, cover topics from the basics of neurosignals to deep-brain stimulation and antiepileptic devices. Students learn about software, brain-computer interface (BCI) hardware, the regulatory and approval process for devices, and start-up companies and entrepreneurship in BCI from of the field’s pioneers in implantable brain devices. By the end of the course students will be able to design and implement a scaled-down computer interface device in computer software simulations, and understand basic concepts involved in its implementation and approval.

Instructor: Marius Guenzel

Spring 2023

This course combines insights from behavioral economics and psychology to shed light on anomalous decisions by investors and possibly behavior of asset prices. Its content is designed to both complement and challenge the “rational” investment paradigms developed in the early finance classes. It introduces students to much modern theoretical and empirical research showing this paradigm to be insufficient to describe various features of actual financial markets. The course structure involves early lectures, several cases, and a final project involving “real life” examples and some modern research methods. In the capstone project students research and explore a specific behavioral bias or a profitable investment opportunity. Students will work in groups to simulate the behavior of, say: a portfolio management team looking for a new trading strategy; a consulting firm advising corporations on issues of financial management; or an entrepreneurial start-up developing a retail financial product. The main deliverable is in a form of a “pitch” to potential clients to be delivered both in the form of a group presentation in class and a formal write-up to be submitted by the due date. Completion of FNCE 203 and FNCE 205 is recommended.

Prerequisites: FNCE 1000 AND (FNCE 1010 OR ECON 1020)

Instructor: Jay Gottfried

TBD

Our modern understanding of the brain began with very humble foundations. Long before transgenic mice, MRI scans, and neuronal recordings, most knowledge about brain function was based on clinical observations of human patients with neurological lesions. This advanced seminar will focus on the cognitive neuroscience of perception, emotion, language, and behavior — through the unique perspective of real-life patients — to illustrate fundamental concepts of brain function. Tuesday classes will explore different cognitive neuroscience topics through student presentations and discussion. Thursday classes will involve observing medical history taking and examination of a patient with cognitive deficits pertinent to the Tuesday topic, with opportunity for students to interact with the patient. 

Prerequisite(s): Instructor permission required and PSYC 1090/NRSC 1090

Notes: Juniors and Seniors only

Instructor: Anna Jenkins

TBD

This seminar examines the cognitive and neural mechanisms that enable humans to predict and understand people’s behavior.We will be propelled throughout the course by fundamental questions about the human social brain. For example, why are humans so social? Does the human brain have specialized processes for social thought? Consideration of these questions will involve advanced treatment of a range of topics.

Prerequisite(s): PSYC 1490

Notes: PSYC 4490-601 is an LPS course. PSYC 4490-301,-302 and -303 are Psych Dept. courses

Instructor: Barbara Mellers

TBD

This seminar will be a series of engaging discussions on a variety of topics that are important to the field of behavioral decision theory. We’ll cover issues such as constructed preferences, loss aversion, nudging, emotions, well-being, other-oriented decisions, intuitive predictions, unethical choices, and more. Students will be asked to present papers and generate ideas for potential research projects each week. Grades will be based on class contributions and a paper that is either a literature review or a careful and detailed proposal for a research project.

Prerequisite(s):  Psychology 2530, or 2650

Instructor: Nazli Bhatia

TBD

This course includes not only conflict resolution but techniques which help manage and even encourage the valuable aspects of conflict. The central issues of this course deal with understanding the behavior of individuals, groups, and organizations in conflict management situations. The purpose of this course is to understand the theory and processes of negotiations as it is practiced in a variety of settings. The course is designed to be relevant to the broad spectrum of problems that are faced by the manager and professional including management of multinationals, ethical issues, and alternative dispute resolutions.

Instructor: Emily Falk

Next course offering TBD

In this hands-on course students will work with active researchers in the Communication Neuroscience lab at Penn to gain experience in how research works. Research topics will depend on student interests, with emphasis on one or more of the following: social influence and persuasion, health communication, peer influence in teens, mobile technology, social media, emotion regulation, peace and conflict resolution, mindfulness, interpersonal communication, political communication, adolescent brain development, communication neuroscience. Students will have the opportunity to interact closely with a mentor and will gain experience conceptualizing research questions, designing experiments, collecting data, and making an analysis plan.

Prerequisite(s): COMM 2100 (Communication Research Methods) or permission of the instructor.

Important notes: Permission Needed From Instructor

Instructor: Michael Platt

Half Semester Course 0.5 cu, Fall 2022 (Quarter 2)

Full Semester Course 1.0 cu, Spring 2023

Instructors: Elizabeth Johnson & Barbara Kahn

As consumers, we are constantly exposed to advertisements and experience visual messages from product packages in stores, retail displays, and products already owned. In essence, visual marketing collateral is omnipresent and is an essential part of corporate visual identity, strategy, and communication. Some of this falls to creative graphic design, but advertising, design, and marketing can also be significantly enhanced by knowledge of how visual information and its presentation context can be optimized to deliver desirable and advantageous messages and experiences. This course will emphasize how to measure, interpret, and optimize visual marketing, and will provide an overview of visual perception and visual cognition, eye movements, and attention, and their role and influence on consumer memory, persuasion, choice, and other behaviors.

This course will have a term project collaboration with Unilever on a real marketing problem that can be solved through visual marketing strategies, and representatives of Unilever will be participating in this aspect of the class.

Half Semester Course 0.5 cu, next course offering Fall, 2022 (Quarter 1)

Instructor: Gideon Nave

Basic neuroscience made steady progress throughout the 20th century with only small areas of application outside of medicine. Over the past 30 years, however, breakthroughs in measurement and computation have accelerated basic research and created major applications for business and technology. Currently, applications to marketing research and product development are experiencing explosive growth that has been met with both excitement and skepticism. This mini-course provides an overview of these developments. The course follows a straightforward theory/application format for each major area of cognitive neuroscience. On Tuesdays, the basics of neuroscience are covered along with a few illustrative applications. A key take-away from this part of the course is to gain the elementary scientific knowledge that is necessary to separate “neuro-reality” from “neuro-hype.” On Thursdays, we cover application areas in greater detail. There are two general types of applications. First, there are applications of neuroscience in marketing research. Topics will range from well-known and widely used applications, such as eye-tracking measures in the lab and the field, to emerging methods and measures, such as mobile EEG, face reading algorithms, and fMRI predictors of market response.

Application areas include, packaging and shelf display, copy testing for television and print advertisements, video games, product usability studies, and simulators. Second, there are applications of neuroscience in the development of new products. Product development applications including wearable physiological devices and apps, sensory branding for foods and fragrances, pharmaceuticals and medical devices (especially prosthetic devices), and neuroscience-based “edutainment” designed to enhance cognitive functions. Special attention will also be paid to changes in brain anatomy and function over the lifespan. Key markets are children (mainly for enhancement products), seniors (mainly for remediation/restoration products), and working adults (both enhancement and remediation/restoration products). This course is self-contained and has no prerequisites. That said, students with some background in business, industrial design, psychology, or neuroscience are likely to find the material covered in this course complementary to the knowledge they already have.

New developments in neuroscience, as well as biometrics, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and the human microbiome, offer the opportunity for enhanced precision not only in marketing and finance, but also in the identification of talent, enhancement of performance, and development of full human potential.

Instructor: Joe Kable

Spring 2023

This seminar will review recent research that combines economic, psychological, and neuroscientific approaches to study decision-making. The course will focus on our current state of knowledge regarding the neuroscience of decision-making, and how evidence concerning the neural processes associated with choices might be used to constrain or advance economic and psychological theories of decision-making. Topics covered will include decisions involving risk and uncertainty, decisions that involve learning from experience, decisions in strategic interactions and games, and social preferences.

Instructor: Konrad Kording

Spring 2023

Deep learning techniques now touch on data systems of all varieties. Sometimes, deep learning is a product; sometimes, deep learning optimizes a pipeline; sometimes, deep learning provides critical insights; sometimes, deep learning sheds light on neuroscience or vice versa. The purpose of this course is to deconstruct the hype by teaching deep learning theories, models, skills, and applications that are useful for applications.

Prerequisite(s):  CIS 519 or equivalent

Instructor: Martha Farah

TBD

How does the neuroscience of human decision-making and emotion impact our understanding of ethics and law? What can neuroscience tell us about why people find actions moral or immoral, worthy of praise or punishment? What, if anything, can it tell us normatively about morality, agency and responsibility? And what other insights might neuroscience offer regarding other morally and legally relevant phenomena such as stereotyping and bias, the causes of antisocial behavior and the detection of deception?

Prerequisite(s):  Permission needed from instructor.

Instructor: Emily Falk

Next course offering TBD

A graduate level statistics course, ability to read primary research articles in cognitive neuroscience (no course prereqs, but students with less background may need to do supplemental work at the front end). Considerable resources are devoted to constructing mass media campaigns that persuade individuals exert powerfully influence one another without even knowing it. Still, our ability to design and select optimal messages and interventions is far from perfect. This course will review investigations in social and cognitive psychology and communication sciences that attempt to circumvent the limits of introspection by using biological and implicit measures, with particular focus on neuroimaging studies of social influence and media effects.

Prerequisite(s): no course prereqs, but students with less background may need to do supplemental work at the front end

Instructor: Emily Falk

Next course offering TBD

This interdisciplinary course focuses on understanding the mechanisms of social thinking, media effects and interpersonal communication across multiple levels of analysis. We use the brain as one powerful window to understand and predict outcomes that are challenging to predict otherwise. The course will cover foundational readings and involve weekly, seminar style discussions of recent papers in social neuroscience, neuroeconomics and communication science.

Instructor: Nazli Bhatia

TBD

This course examines the art and science of negotiation. This course develops managerial skills by combining lectures with practice, using exercises where students negotiate with each other. Over the course of the semester, students will engage in a number of simulated negotiations ranging from simple one issue transactions to multi-party joint ventures. Through these exercises and associated readings, students explore the basic theoretical models of bargaining and have an opportunity to test and improve their negotiation skills.