Cognition
How do we perceive, remember, reason, and decide?
Cognition concerns how people make sense of the world and act within it. Its questions connect perception and attention with memory, concepts, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision-making. Research asks what information people use, how they represent it, and which processes could produce their behavior.
Explanations draw on experiments, response times, errors, eye movements, clinical observations, and models. They must also account for the task, the person’s body and experience, and the surrounding situation. Begin with How Can We Study the Mind? to learn how these questions and forms of evidence fit together.
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How Can We Study the Mind?
Explore perception, attention, memory, concepts, language, reasoning, and choice by comparing explanations with the observations that could distinguish them.
Introductory · 11 core readings · 6 units · Prerequisites: No prior course in cognitive psychology is required. The guides introduce the key terms and explain what the methods can reveal.
Begin the syllabus →Additional syllabi
How Do We Perceive the World?
Explore perceptual judgment, grouping and recognition, expectations, sensory integration, and action by comparing what different explanations predict.
Introductory · 8 readings
How Do We Direct Attention and Control Thought?
Examine attention, distraction, awareness, automaticity, task switching, and the evidence for adjustments in cognitive control.
Intermediate · 9 readings
How Do We Remember—and Why Do We Forget?
Explore how experiences are retained and retrieved, why remembering can reshape them, and how evidence distinguishes competing explanations of forgetting.
Intermediate · 9 readings
How Do We Organize Knowledge?
Compare typical examples, remembered instances, explanatory knowledge, goals, cultural experience, and neural accounts of how meaning is organized and used.
Intermediate · 8 readings
How Do We Understand and Use Language?
Explore spoken and written word recognition, sentence and discourse comprehension, speech production, conversation, and the relationship between language and thought.
Intermediate · 11 readings
How Do We Reason and Solve Problems?
Explore deduction, hypothesis testing, induction, causal reasoning, analogy, and insight through competing accounts of how thought works.
Intermediate · 10 readings
How Do We Judge and Decide?
Examine how people judge probabilities, form preferences, value risk and delay, use emotion and experience, and decide when to trust a judgment.
Intermediate · 11 readings