Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychologists study how organisms acquire, remember, categorize, and use knowledge. Cognitive psychology is concerned with attention, perception, conscious and nonconscious information processing, learning and memory, concept formation, symbolic representation and language, thinking and problem solving, and reasoning and decision making. This course familiarizes students with the methods used by cognitive psychologists and with current theories and research on cognitive processes. Students gain an appreciation for the diverse sources of errors in our reasoning and decision making and the need for critical thinking in real life as well as in academic studies.