I am teaching a Cognitive Neuroscience class that focuses on what we can learn about normal brain function by studying individuals with cognitive deficits. For the lab component, I would like to emphasize the importance of converging methods and testing hypotheses by having students participate in experiments that model cognitive deficits in neurologically intact individuals. That is, experiments that will cause normal performance to break down in a fashion similar to the performance of individuals with cognitive deficits.
For example, I have created an experiment in which normal recall of newly learned object attributes is worse for living than non-living things, an analogue to category specific agnosia for living things (Bukach et al., 2004).
Ideally, the experiments should span the various cognitive systems, including attention, action, memory, language, etc.
I think this would be a useful set of experiments for teaching a variety of cognitive classes, and would make a nice change from other currently available teaching packages of cognitive experiments that focus on classic cognitive tasks.
I will post a version of this task as soon as I convert it to Superlab. It would be great if others could contribute ideas or tasks that cover their areas of expertise.