Cognitive Psychology PSYC 3342
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1969.6/96017
Browse
Browsing Cognitive Psychology PSYC 3342 by Author "Scarince, Collin"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item 01 Cognitive Psychology: Module 1(4/6/2023) Scarince, CollinImagine the following situation: A young man, let’s call him Perry, was sitting at his desk, reading some papers required to complete a psychology assignment. In his right hand he held a cup of coffee. With his left one he reached for a bag of chips without removing the focus of his eyes from the paper. He reads the letters on the page and understands their meaning. Suddenly, he glanced up to the ceiling of his room and asked himself, “What is happening here?” Probably everybody has had experiences like the one described above. Even though, at first glance, there is nothing exciting happening in this everyday situation, a lot of what Perry just did or thought is highly interesting particularly for researchers and students in the field of Cognitive Psychology.Item 01 Cognitive Psychology: Module 2(4/6/2023) Scarince, CollinModule 2: Introduction to Psychology Research Methods Cognitive Psychology, like other psychology disciplines, relies heavily on the scientific method - the process of using careful observation of the world to develop and test hypotheses. Cognitive psychologists typically use experiments to develop theories and test hypotheses. In an experiment, researchers manipulate, or cause changes, in the independent variable, and observe or measure any impact of those changes in the dependent variable. The independent variable (or variables) is a variable under the experimenter’s control, or the variable that is intentionally altered between groups. In the case of a memory experiment, an independent variable might be the amount of time a participant has to study a list of 30 words they later need to recall. For this example, let's say one group of participants can study the list for 1 minutes, and another can study it for 5 minutes. The dependent variable is the variable that is not manipulated at all, or the one where the effect happens. One way to help remember this is that the dependent variable “depends” on what happens to the independent variable. Continuing with the memory example, the proportion of words a participant might recall (the dependent variable) depends on how long the participant could study the list (the independent variable). Thus, any observed changes or group differences in recall can be attributed to the time spent studying.Item 01 Cognitive Psychology: Module 3(4/6/2023) Scarince, CollinModule 3: Cognitive Psychology Research Methods Behavior Methods One of the important assumptions of cognitive psychology experiments is that the more cognitive processes or stress on cognitive processes a task requires, the longer it will take to complete that task or more errors will be committed while completing the task. Let's return to Perry for a moment. If the reading assignment for Perry's class is to read a chapter from a textbook, which is written to summarize a body of research for an undergraduate to understand, he might have no problem reading at a steady pace while also munching on his snacks. Contrast that to if Perry were assigned to read an original peer-reviewed research article from an academic journal, where the audience is other professionals in the field. In this case, Perry will likely have to dedicate more mental effort to understand what is written in the article and to understand the authors' conclusions based on the results of their study. If you were to compare his behavior of the two readings, you might expect that (after accounting for length of the reading) it would take Perry longer to complete the article compared to the textbook chapter. You might also expect that if Perry were to take a quiz over the two different readings, Perry might make more wrong answer on the article quiz than the textbook quiz.