Course: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology: An Experimental Science

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

Class exercise To reiterate: the evidence shows that people are far less likely to make the conjunction error when probed with the “how many” question than the corresponding “how probable” …