Readings for PSY240, Cognitive Psychology, Fall 2019 (Cottey College)
Since I am a cognitive psychologist, I am looking forward to teaching you about my field. It is my hope that you will gain a better understanding of how you mentally navigate your world, perhaps in ways that you were not previously aware of! If you’ve taken Research Methods with me, you know that one of the ways that psychologists gain knowledge is by reading peer-reviewed journal articles of scientific studies for background information; this is an important part of the research process. If you’re new to reading about cognitive psychology, as many of you will be, it can be hard to understand the technical concepts that are being discussed, especially in scientific articles.
One way to help increase your access and understanding as you read these journal articles has been provided for you by the Psychonomic Society, a professional organization for cognitive psychologists. In a “Featured Content” section, contributors write blog posts that can highlight major findings from journal articles. These blog posts can help guide your understanding as you read!
Throughout the semester, I’ll be directing your attention to various blog posts and corresponding articles on this landing page. I will refer to them in class, so be sure to read them. At two different points in the semester, I’ll ask you to select a blog post and corresponding article of your choice and write a short paper. Each of these will be worth 40 points. To earn full points on the assignment, the paper should be 2-3 pages, and you’ll need to answer the following questions or prompts:
Using your own words, summarize the major conclusions of the research
How did the corresponding blog post clarify some of the difficulties you might have had in understanding the research?
Did you read the blog post before the article, or vice versa? Do you think this helped or hurt your understanding?
Draw some connections between what you’ve learned in this blog post and article, and what you’ve learned from lectures and your textbook about this particular topic—no more than a paragraph
Do you have any ideas for future research based on the conclusions of the study? If so, list them.
Are there some interesting points in the article that weren’t included in the blog post?
Would you have added anything else to the blog post? If so, what and why?
Readings for PSY240, Cognitive Psychology, Fall 2019 (Cottey College)
YouTube is (in)famous for its cat videos. An estimate from 2015, now surely superseded by masses of additional material, located more than 2 million cat videos on YouTube that collectively have been watched 25,000,000,000 times. Even if you are not a cat aficionado, there is at least one video that is worth watching. It explains […]
Readings for PSY240, Cognitive Psychology, Fall 2019 (Cottey College)
There are some tasks that require cognitive processes that are habitual, automatic, and to some degree effortless, such as seeing a word and automatically reading it or seeing two numbers and automatically processing their magnitudes (e.g., seeing 5 and 3 and perceiving 5 to be greater). There are other tasks that require cognitive processes that […]
Readings for PSY240, Cognitive Psychology, Fall 2019 (Cottey College)
When you go grocery shopping, how do you remember what to buy? Write down a list, of course. That slip of paper, or your smartphone, will do the remembering for you (it’s an external memory, as we have noted on this blog before). But what if you lose the paper or your phone’s battery dies? […]
Readings for PSY240, Cognitive Psychology, Fall 2019 (Cottey College)
If you witness a crime, you may be asked to try to pick the perpetrator out of a police lineup. If you are unfamiliar with this line of research or have never been an eyewitness, your notion of a lineup may have come from movies and tv, and may be something like this: (Warning: watching […]
Readings for PSY240, Cognitive Psychology, Fall 2019 (Cottey College)
What are your favorite, best-ever movie quotes? Is it “I’ll have what she’s having”? Or “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”? What about “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”? If you are unsure, here is a list of the best 100 movie quotes of all time according to Hollywood. But […]
Readings for PSY240, Cognitive Psychology, Fall 2019 (Cottey College)
Today’s cigarette may yield considerable satisfaction to a smoker, although that satisfaction will likely pale in comparison to the disutility arising from that person’s lung cancer in the future. Likewise, today’s Big Mac and extra-large bag of potato chips may gratify the consumer but the long-term consequences—from obesity to diabetes to heart attacks—are unlikely to […]
Readings for PSY240, Cognitive Psychology, Fall 2019 (Cottey College)
Your tone of voice can tell others a lot about what you mean. Which intonation you use in a sentence matters and your intonation can help listeners figure out the critical difference between “Let’s eat, Grandma!” and “Let’s eat Grandma!” This is only one of a number of examples showing just how the same words […]
Readings for PSY240, Cognitive Psychology, Fall 2019 (Cottey College)
What does Bob look like? … Bob who? … No, just Bob, any Bob. And while you are at it, what does Kirk look like? At first glance those questions appear absurd. How could anyone infer an unknown person’s looks from their name? Why would the average Bob look any different from the average Kirk? […]
Readings for PSY240, Cognitive Psychology, Fall 2019 (Cottey College)
Type “working memory” into Google Scholar and you get nearly 2,000,000 results. Topping the list is the paper “working memory” by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch, which has been cited more than 12,000 times since its publication in 1974. The Web of Science search engine is slightly more modest, with around 54,000 scientific publications being […]
