The operations of the mind, which are the topic matter of Cognitive Psychology, are so ubiquitous that they are difficult to address and even notice. A common experience of students of Cognitive Psychology is that by questioning and reflecting upon simple everyday activities, much of your ordinary mental life begins to seem quite extra-ordinary. For instance, reading this sentence involves perception, attention, language comprehension, and, hopefully, some kind of critical reflection on its contents. You will soon be in a position to appreciate that the feats accomplished by your mind on a normal basis are both more marvelous and more mysterious than any current computer animation or the most sophisticated special effects in movies.

It is testament to your mind’s success that its surprisingly complex operations are typically unconscious and thus remain unnoticed. In order to query its mechanisms we will thus have to adopt a specific mode of investigative curiosity that combines intuitions, speculative hypotheses, and empirical evidence (gained by several methodological approaches) in order to develop, refine and test scientific theories.

This course examines research on human and some animal cognitive processes, including perception, attention, memory, comprehension, reasoning, decision-making, problem-solving, and the interaction of all these. The course will give you an overview over past and current research and theory in cognitive psychology, a basic understanding of the empirical methods used, and an understanding of the ways in which knowledge of these processes has been applied to real-world problems and to improve the quality of life.

Announcements

• 04/14/09 : The guidelines for Presentations can be found here (FinalProject Guidelines)
• 03/27/09 : Quiz 8 will be on Tuesday (March 31). On Friday, PDFs of final project papers are due along with short paragraphs of your topics.
• 03/18/09 : Quiz 7 will be on Tuesday (March 24). It will cover Chapters 8 and 9. On Friday, we will go over how to do the Final Project and form groups.
• 03/06/09 : HW 6 is due March 17 - see special instructions in link below. Final Project instructions were discussed in class today - see lecture notes.
• 03/03/09 : Quiz 6 will be on Friday (March 6). HW 6 will be due AFTER Spring Break, for instructruction see: Instructions
• 02/24/09 : Quiz 5 will be on Friday (Feb 27).
• 02/15/09 : NO CLASS on Tuesday (Feb 17). Quiz 4 will be on Friday (Feb 20).
• 01/30/09 : For Experiment Participation visit Experimetrix at https://experimetrix2.com/rpi/
• 01/26/09 : HW Comments have gone out, you should check the important clarifications made to the assignment in the slides for Lecture 4 and the Syllabus below.
• Syllabus (*NEW* updated on Jan 26th, 2009)
• Final Project Description

Lectures

• 01/16/09 : Lecture 1 : Intro to CogPsych (pdf) (ppt)
• 01/20/09 : Lecture 2 : Cognition & Brain 1(pdf)
• 01/23/09 : Lecture 3 : Cognition & Brain 2(pdf)
• 01/27/09 : Lecture 4 : Perception 1(pdf) Note this has important information about HW assignments.
• 01/30/09 : Lecture 5 : Perception 2(pdf), Color Perception (pdf)
• 02/03/09 : Lecture 6 : Attention 1(pdf)
• 02/06/09 : Lecture 7 : Attention 2(pdf)
• 02/10/09 : Lecture 8 : Short-term Memory 1(pdf)
• 02/13/09 : Lecture 9 : Short-term Memory 2(pdf)
• 02/20/09 : Lecture 10 : Long-term Memory 1(pdf)
• 02/24/09 : Lecture 11 : Long-term Memory 2(pdf)
• 02/27/09 : Lecture 12 : Memory Errors(pdf)
• 03/02/09 : Lecture 13 : Knowledge 1(pdf)
• 03/06/09 : Lecture 14 : Knowledge 2(pdf)
• 03/18/09 : Lecture 15 : Visual Imagery(pdf)
• 03/24/09 : Lecture 16 : Language 1(pdf)
• 03/27/09 : Lecture 17 : Language 2(pdf)
• 03/31/09 : Lecture 18 : Problem Solving 1(pdf)
• 04/03/09 : Lecture 19 : Problem Solving 2(pdf)
• 04/07/09 : Lecture 20 : Reasoning and Decision Making(pdf)
• 04/14/09 : Lecture 21 : Cognitive Architectures(pdf)