Welcome and introductory remarks

Welcome

Over the coming weeks we will introduce you to various ways in which cognitive psychologists have studied the mind.

A critical aspect of the course is to demonstrate how our ideas about how the mind works are informed by data collected in experiments. We have set out opportunities for you to act as the experimental participant and we hope that you will be able to collect your own data from other participants. Our intention is to collect the relevant data during the associated week and then provide summaries of those data so that everyone can see what we have found out.

Please note that active tutor facilitation is limited to the number of teaching weeks from when the course run started. Please do not therefore expect any further tutor engagement from beyond then, although you are very welcome to continue to work through the course materials in a self-directed fashion from that point.

Some details about the course

The course is also distinctive in that there are a variety of class exercises that occur throughout and we highlight these.

Class exercise

The intention is to have you engage with the exercise before moving forward. Typically, the exercise sets one or more challenges for you to engage with and typically (but not always) the answers and solutions are provided in the immediate next step. In some cases, the exercises mean clicking on an external link that will take you to a different place on the web. Where this is the case you can either click on a link or a copy of the link is made explicit and you can copy and paste this into a new tab in your browser. You may find that the latter method is preferred. In also providing explicit links, you can copy these and send them to willing volunteers. Yes, we are very keen that you gain hands on experience in testing your own participants.

To this end we also have included Class experiments.

Class experiments

In each of the three weeks we have provided a class experiment that provides a means for you to collect your own data. Over Weeks 1 and 2 we provide you two opportunities to set up an experiment and test your own participants. In Week 3, you can act as a participant in an online task and you might also consider recruiting others to take the test. We will make sure that summaries of the findings will available once there has been ample time to collect the data.

Welcome from Rob

Rob is a Reader in Experimental Psychology in the Department of Psychology, The University of York. He will be the person you will see and hear explaining the material as the course unfolds.

We trust you will enjoy engaging with the course as it unfolds over coming weeks.

And finally, when you have finished reading a section, please ‘Mark as complete’, and move onto the next step.