Cognitive Psychology and the Mind

Course Coordinator: Dr Vera Hau, BA (Hunter College, CUNY); MA, PhD (Stony Brook University, SUNY)

Course Developer: The Open University, UK, Course Team

Advisory prerequisite(s)
You are strongly advised to have already studied PSYC A212 / PSYC A212C.

Aims
This course aims to assist students in mastering the basic concepts, theories and methods of cognitive psychology, and to develop students’ interest in, and appreciation of, the importance of this field of psychology.

Contents
The course is divided into five main parts:

• The first part introduces the cognitive approach to psychology — the approach of trying to understand the workings of the mind in terms of processing information — and considers how we perceive aspects of our immediate environment, how we pay attention to certain things and not to others, and how we manage to recognize objects.

• The second part of the course focuses on memory, especially on how what we may think of as ‘memory’ is actually composed of many different kinds of memory, each with different properties.

• The third part of the course is devoted to concepts and language. It focuses on how we process language and on relationships between language and thinking. This part of the course also considers how we categorize objects.

• The fourth part of the course focuses on thinking, that is, on how we reason, how we make judgments and come to decisions, and how we set about solving problems.

• The fifth part of the course focuses on the topics of emotion and consciousness, and applications of cognitive psychology.

Learning support
There will be 17 two-hour tutorials and three two-hour day schools.

Assessment
There will be six assignments and a final examination. Students are required to submit assignments via the Online Learning Environment (OLE).

Set book(s)
There are no set books for this course.