Cognitive Psychology

What is cognitive psychology?

Where did cognitive psychology come from and its origins. Wilhelm Wundt.

How does cognitive psychology relate to clinical psychology, neuropsychology, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence and philosophy?

Is our experience proactive (thinking comes from our brain) or reactive (noticing things in the environment)?

Humans have an area at the back of our eyes known as the blind spot where the optic nerve leaves the eye.

Try it out: watch how the brain fills in gaps in the blind spot.

Does the human brain build an internal representation of the world rather than us experiencing the world directly?

Vase-face illusion and illusory contours.

How can a black-and-white photo appear to be in colour?

How does colour vision work and why do humans see in colour?

How do we work out how far away an object is? Is it true that you need two eyes to judge depth?

Blindsight is a phenomenon where blind people are able make better-than-average guesses, suggesting that visual information is travelling to the brain, even if they are not consciously aware of it.

How do humans hear sounds?

Cochlear implants allow profoundly death people to hear.

Amusia is better known as tone deafness.

Why are humans so good at doing CAPTCHAs when computers struggle?

What makes humans especially good at recognising faces?

Prosopagnosia is a condition where people are unable to recognise familiar faces.

Capgras Syndrome is a condition where people think their loved ones have been replaced by duplicates.

How are humans able to understand speech, even in a crowded room with other conversations going on?

Definition of mental imagery, also sometimes referred to as visualisation.

Aphantasia is a condition in which people are unable to use mental imagery.

Why is mental imagery important in problem-solving?

Examples of using mental imagery in sport psychology.

Why is mental imagery effective for learning new skills? We'll consider the path impulses take through the secondary motor cortex, primary motor cortex and muscles.

PETTLEP is an acronym used for mental imagery: Physical, Environment, Task, Timing, Learning, Emotion, and Perspective.

Gibson's model of direct perception.

Do humans view the world in terms of functions?

Why do people consistently try to pull a door that says "push" on it?

How do we work out where a ball is going and run to that spot?

Glover's planning and control model.

Would you notice if the person you were talking to was replaced by someone else? Research by Simons and Levin suggest we may not.

The role of attention and peripheral vision in change blindness.

The Invisible Gorilla explained.

What is attention?

Why are we more likely to notice when someone says our name?

How does multitasking work?

In the Stroop test, participants are presented with the name of a colour. The text may be in the same colour as the word or may be in a different colour. For example, they are presented with the word "red", which may be in a red colour or a different colour (yellow, say).

Memory systems in the brain can be divided into sensory, short-term memory (now known as working memory) and long-term memory.

The Atkinson-Shiffrin model of sensory, short-term and long-term memory.

Echoic is a sensory memory that holds auditory information.

Iconic memory is a sensory memory that holds visual information.

Working memory is an updated name for short-term memory. The Baddeley and Hitch model suggests has multiple components.

The phonological loop is the part of working memory that handles speech-based information.

The visuospatial sketchpad is the part of working memory that handles visual and spatial information.

The central executive is the part of working memory that monitors routine and non-routine tasks.

The episodic buffer provides working memory with temporary storage.

We typically think of short-term memory as holding around 7 items. But is this true? What about chunking?

An overview of long-term memory including declarative vs non-declarative memory, episodic, semantic, implicit and procedural memory.

Episodic memory is the part of long-term memory that holds our experiences.

Semantic memory is the part of long-term memory that holds factual information.

Do you ever type in a key code automatically but then when you try and think about it, you don't know how to do it? In this lesson, we'll explore what is happening.

Why do we need to forget and how does forgetting work?

Amnesia is an impairment to the functioning of long-term memory. It can be anterograde or retrograde, or both.

Types of memory tests including free recall, cued recall and recognition.