PSYCH 237
Cognitive Psychology, spring 2023 (senior year)
Course Description
Focus includes information processing, learning and remembering speech, artistic, musical and athletic performance, invention and other forms of creativity. Students unlock the mind’s mysteries using state-of-the-art scientific instrumentation, developing cognitive science knowledge and research skills.
Course Content
Rationale
From my original proposal: This course outlines the science of thinking, with a special emphasis on remembering and producing speech, and other performative activities. This study builds upon my questions about the production and processing of language as well as impediments that may arise. This examination of the brain and cognitive processes highlights the practical elements of linguistics.
Research Project
In the lab component of this course, we conducted our own original psychological research based on the ideas presented in this course. My lab group focused on the phenomenon of false memory, and administered a word association task to test if susceptibility to false memory in this task is linked to higher scores on mental health screening surveys. The methods and IRB (which were submitted for approval prior to any actual data collection) are linked below, as is our final research poster.
Takeaways
My main takeaway from this course is that language has the real power to shape our perception of events, as well as our cognitive activity. This is exemplified through differences in social perceptions in groups who speak different languages. This course also delved into how language can help us to categorize and understand our own experience and memories. Language is a huge part of cognition, and essentially inseparable from many mental processes.
Connections
This course connects most to PSYCH 222 (Psychology of Hearing) because of the discussion of mental processing of language and sound. It also connects well to PSYCH 241 (Developmental Psychology) because of the discussion of infantile amnesia and the development of certain cognitive processes. Both course pages are linked below.