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Academic Goals
Departmental Learning Goals for Psychology 355: Cognitive Psychology
BackgroundCognitive psychology is the study of the human ability to perceive, understand, reason about, and take action within the world of everyday experience. It is also deeply concerned with memory processes that preserve our knowledge of past experiences. The principal tools of cognitive psychology are well-designed experimental studies of behavior, studies of brain activity under controlled conditions, and computational models of perception and cognition. In Psychology 355, students learn how these tools have been used to reveal how humans perceive objects and other features of their environment; how people focus attention on critical features of the environment while excluding less relevant information; how people maintain information for short durations in working memory and for longer durations in long-term memory; and how people reason while solving problems or making decisions.
Specific learning goals: By the end of the course, students should be able to:- Recognize how everyday activities like reading, having a conversation, crossing the street when traffic is present, and planning a meal, involve a number of major cognitive functions such as object perception, motion perception, categorization, manipulation of information in working memory, retrieval of information from long-term memory, etc.
- Discuss the major structures and processes involved in perception, attention, working memory and long-term memory.
- Discuss what is known about neural information processing, brain structure and brain activity to the extent that it pertains to human performance of major cognitive functions like object recognition, attention, or memory retrieval.
- Describe the experimental evidence that supports major hypotheses about the nature of attention, working memory, long-term memory, problem solving and reasoning.
- Describe different ways that humans represent information within the cognitive system and the evidence that demonstrates the existence of these forms of mental representation.
- Understand the tentative nature of knowledge, tolerate ambiguity, and search for alternative explanations of phenomena.
- Use skeptical inquiry to distinguish between theories that are well-supported by evidence from those that are not. Understand the role of hypothesis testing in building theories about cognitive structure and process. In other words, understand how modern cognitive psychologists approach the investigation of perception, memory, thinking and reasoning.
- Describe ways that cognitive psychology helps us understand our own behavior and thought processes, including aspects of behavior and thinking that are not obvious to the layman.
