Course: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology: An Experimental Science

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 …

Rob discusses another really intriguing imagery puzzle that has been taken to show just how knowledge of the real world influences our ability to reason about it. The fact that …

What we intend to do as the material unfolds is provide key examples of the evidence regarding mental rotation and also try to dispel some common myths that have grown …

The class experiment has been designed as an on-line experiment. The experiment has been configured as a reaction time task. As in our rotating Rs task, as soon as a …

Class exercise We cannot hope to do justice to the length and depth of the debate that has taken place over how best to explain these kinds of data that …

Here are the answers to the previous exercises. Exercise 1 – The letter “T” Imagine the number ‘7’. Make the diagonal line vertical. Move the horizontal line down to the …

So, if we have concerns over the picture-like nature of our mental images, what else might be going on? Here Rob opens up the possibility that some sort of language-like …

Here we introduce some experimental data that has been collected in a bid to understand better visual thinking and mental imagery. One of the basic questions, we address, is: How …

The mental scanning experiment that Rob just described is another example of a classic experiment in Cognitive Psychology. But since it was originally reported there has been significant debate over …

Class exercise Now we are going to get you to work on the information that you have stored in memory about our three individuals. It is critical therefore to answer …

Check your answers by now going back to the picture and by actually seeing whether your answers are correct or not. This kind of example can be used to make …

How can we best understand what is going on in our mental modelling exercise? In this regard, cognitive psychologists have been particularly concerned with trying to answer what is the …

Class exercise In order to examine this in more detail there is a final survey that has been configured to collect some data on this and here we will be …

To begin it is best to start with a concrete example. Last week we introduced the concept of a mental model – remember our virtual roomful of beekeepers, artists and …

The Framing Effect: The classic findings The classic finding is that the majority decide on Program A in the Group 1 scenario and Program D in the Group 2 scenario. …