01 Cognitive Psychology: Module 3

Module 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.