COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Catalog description

Cognitive psychology is a survey of the study of human attention, memory and thinking. This course addresses a variety of topics, including selective attention, short-term and long-term memory, encoding and retrieval processes, problem solving, language and many others. Although these represent a diverse set of topics, this course connects them with common themes and questions, such as “How does the human mind operate?” and “How do limitations of the human mind impact our success in life?” For each topic, the course covers the nature of the problem to be studied and methods that have been used to investigate it. The course primarily explores scientific theories – that is, explanations for human behavior with respect to each topic covered – but may also cover questions of general public interest relevant to everyday life, such as “Can you train your brain by playing games?” and “How good is eyewitness testimony?”