Cognitive Psychology

The aim of the course is to deepen students' understanding and appreciation of how a cognitive approach can help us to understand our own behaviour and experience, and that of other people, whether in our personal or professional life.

The first part of the course focuses on basic cognitive processes. Central topics include how visual perception solves the problem of perceiving the external world, the roles of mental imagery, what attention is and how it controls our lives, how we remember and forget, and to what extent cognitive neuroscience can provide a scientific explanation of consciousness. The course includes discussion of the relationship between normal cognitive functioning, impaired functioning and unusual skills.

The second part of the course focuses on complex mental processes such as reasoning, decision making, problem solving and creativity, as well as on how emotions influence these processes. Teaching will include how these processes operate in expert professional groups such as clinical psychologists, other health personnel, and the police. Examples will be discussed of how experts evaluate and deal with risk, and how they gather the information needed for evaluations and decisions.

In this course, particular focus is given to developing students' writing skills in presenting concise and precise academic arguments. Feedback on writing skills is an important aspect of some course assignments.

In order to deepen knowledge of how research within the area of cognitive psychology is conducted, analysed, presented in journal articles, and used in applied settings, students will take part in an empirical assignment where they study at least one empirical paper in detail, then collect related data (for example a replication study) via pre-programmed online experiments. Class members take the role of participants.

Students will become acquainted with the analysis of their data, and then orally present their findings and discussion to other students during a conference day at the end of the course. As an alternative to this assignment, teachers may sometimes offer particularly motivated students the possibility to work as a research assistant within an ongoing empirical project in the field of cognitive psychology; research assistants will then present their project and findings at the conference day.

When teacher capacity is available, a third option for the empirical assignment is that a limited number of students may volunteer to take an introductory course in mindfulness meditation which includes several classroom sessions and home practice. Students will use this experience of first-person methodologies in attentional training to inform their study of a set research question, based on at least one empirical paper on mindfulness training, with oral presentation of findings at the end-of-semester conference. This option is especially aimed at students who wish to establish a personal mindfulness practice as a foundation for later incorporating mindfulness into their clinical work.

Knowledge
On completion of the course, the student will have:

• Advanced theoretical, empirical and applied knowledge of basic mental processes from a cognitive perspective.
• Knowledge of quantitative research methods used in cognitive psychology.

Skills
On completion of the course, the student will be able to:

• Analyse and critically reflect on central experimental findings, and on core cognitive processes in areas such as perception, attention, memory, consciousness, reasoning and the extent to which human thought can be considered rational, judgement and decision making including advantages and disadvantages of heuristic processing, problem solving, creativity, risk assessment, and how emotion influences cogntive processes.
• Apply knowledge of cognitive processes to help understand cognitive deficits in certain clinical populations, and to facilitate clinical evaluations and decisions.
• Analyse and critically reflect on current theory and research within cognitive psychology, be able to place these in a historical context, and be able to apply cognitive psychology to professional reasoning.

General Competence
On completion of the course the student will be able to:

• Reflect on the importance of empirical evidence for theoretical positions within various areas of cognitive psychology.
• Contribute to professional innovation by reflecting on how the cognitive perspective contributes to understanding human behavior and experience.
• Reflect on how cognitive psychology can enhance understanding of how most people - as well as professional experts - evaluate, make decisions, and act.
• Apply relevant theoretical and empirical research literature in a practical context, and use their research competence to update themselves academically.
• Analyze and disseminate relevant research, and master cognitive terminology used by professional psychologists.
• Communicate and disseminate cognitive knowledge, both to other professional groups and specialists.