Course Description
This course provides a comprehensive overview of cognitive psychology, the scientific study of mental processes: how people acquire, store, transform, use, and communicate information. Topics include perception, attention, language, memory, reasoning, problem solving, decision-making, and consciousness.
In general, this course is designed to help you learn: (1) how to turn big, imprecise questions about the human mind into concrete, empirical questions, and (2) how to find and evaluate evidence to answer these questions. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to answer crucial questions about the human mind: How do our perceptual systems process information? What limits our ability to see and remember the world? When does human memory and reasoning work well – and what can make things go wrong? How can we optimize our own learning? Along the way, you’ll learn to identify questions that are really about the mind, rather than the brain – and so are best answered by psychology, not neuroscience.
Prerequisites: PSYC 1, PSYC 6, or COGS 1
Texts & Materials
Textbook: Reisberg, D. (2021). Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind, 8th edition . W.W. Norton publishing. (Required).
You will be required to read 1-2 chapters every week; this will be outlined in the course schedule.
This syllabus and lecture slides will be available online for the course. The slides will be posted after class. Recordings will be made available through Panopto Video on canvas as well.
Assessment & Grading
There will be in-class midterms during the quarter and one cumulative final exam. All exams will consist primarily of multiple-choice questions and will be based on both the readings from the textbook and online experiments and lectures.
The two mid-term exams each contribute 25% to the final grade. The final exam contributes 40% to the final grade. The final 10% of your grade will be based on your successfully completing experiments. In order to earn the full 10% of your grade, you’ll need to complete 6 assigned online experiments. Each online experiment is worth 1% of your grade (overall: 6%). The additional 4% for your final grade you will get for completing 4 hours of SONA experiments, or alternatively, writing a paper.
Thus, your final grade will be determined the following way:
Midterm I: 25%; Midterm II: 25%; Final: 40%; Online experiments: 6%; Sona experiments: 4%
We will use the standard grading scheme for your final grade (e.g., 87.00+ is an B+, 83.00+ is an B, 80.00+ is an B-, etc.).
SCHEDULE AT GLANCE:
Week 1: Introduction, Perception
Week 2: Attention
Week 3: Working Memory
Week 4: Long-term Memory
Week 5: Long-term Memory and Language
Week 6: Language and Concept
Week 7: Visual Knowledge
Week 8 : Decision-Making
Week 9: Intelligence and Consciousness
Week 10: Review