Psychological & Brain Sciences (PBS), Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience

Collection Development Statement

Last updated July 2020

Overview

This collection supports research and teaching that deals broadly with the brain. The Homewood academic departments and programs focus on research and research methodologies, not clinical practice.

Departments/disciplines/programs subject areas supported

Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences

Department of Cognitive Science

Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience

Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute

All units are part of the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences. The undergraduate major in linguistics is provided by Cognitive Science. Animal models are used in PBS and the Mind/Brain Institute. In 2018-2019, the Neuroscience Program was the second most popular undergraduate major on the Homewood campus.

Subjects covered include: developmental psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, learning, memory, perception and senses, aging, brain science, animal behavior, and other psychological topics. Computational methodologies including brain imaging and eye tracking are used, with the needed visualization and statistical methods.

General

Clinical care is not the focus of these departments and programs; those efforts take place on the medical campus and are supported by the Welch Medical Library. Researchers in Cognitive Science occasionally treat a subjective, but the primary goal is research.

Formats Selected

There is a strong preference for online resources.

Preferred formats

• Journals
• Scholarly monographs
• Literature databases/indexes
• Grammars

Material acquired by request or selectively

• Linguistic/language databases
• Reference works
• Handbooks
• Computer manuals
• Textbooks
• DVD/streaming video
• Psychological tests – this includes the type of test or scale answered by subjects as well as more visual sets of information for subjects to react to. Requests have been received for decks of human faces and 2D representations of rooms.

Material not collected

• Ephemera
• Biographies
• Histories
• Workbooks
• Pamphlets
• Manuscripts

Languages Collected

Scientific material is primarily in English. The linguistics faculty require linguistics research about many languages, as well as research in a number of languages, primarily European languages. The Center for Language & Speech Processing requires grammars for their programming needs.

Chronological or geographical focus

Emphasis is on current and recent scholarship.

Collaborations

• School of Medicine – departments of Neurology and Psychiatry
• Center for Language & Speech Processing, Whiting School of Engineering
• East Baltimore labs – Faculty book research time on machines for different types of brain scans