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In this course we will look at how our cognitive abilities function in real-life situations. We will discuss everyday memory such as our autobiographical memory and how reliable our memory is in regard to eyewitness testimonies and police interviews; We will look at various memory strategies to improve memory performance (e.g., spacing, mnemonics, retrieval facilitation and inhibition); We will cover our information-processing abilities (working memory) as we age and how we make decisions throughout the day (decision making); Finally we will look at how our cognitive abilities are affected by biological processes (e.g. circadian rhythms, menstrual cycle) and various types of drugs (legal and illegal).
This book reviews recent research in the application of cognitive methods, theories, and models. It explores all of the major areas of cognitive psychology, including attention, perception, memory, thinking and decision making, as well as some of the factors that affect cognitive processes, such as drugs and biological cycles. The order in which the chapters are presented reflects the sequential order in which the various aspects of cognition tend to occur, so the early chapters are concerned with the initial uptake of information, followed by chapters dealing with information storage, and then chapters about the use of stored information.
This book discusses contemporary approaches to childhood memories and examines cutting-edge research on the development of autobiographical memory. There are 14 chapters altogether, each making a unique contribution by describing a specific developmental domain. Topics covered include the emergence of self in relation to the autobiographical memory system, effects of early socialization patterns on this development, neural structure and behavioral functions of the memory system, methods used to study autobiographical memories, the roles of individual factors such as self-construals, culture, emotions, and gender on memory development, and the functions of autobiographical memories.
This book, based on the latest research in cognitive science, offers strategies to boost memory and learning. Over the course of the book, the authors weave together stories from an array of learners—surgeons, pilots, gardeners, and school and university students—to illustrate their arguments about how successful learning takes place. The opening chapter discusses some main arguments such as re-reading and massed practice are popular but ineffective; good learning is active learning; etc. Chapters two to seven spell out the proofs and implications of the recent studies in cognitive psychology. The last chapter suggests three main strategies in the learning process which are active retrieval, spaced repetition and interleaving.
This book addresses major questions about how age affects working memory. Some approaches focus on why some people show faster cognitive decline with age than others. Others focus on whether there are different working memory functions that are differentially affected by age in all healthy adults, and whether age-related changes in long-term memory affect working memory in similar ways. Multiple research groups are exploring the possibility that cognitive training might help to slow age-related cognitive decline, whereas advances in brain image techniques are allowing major advances in understanding how age-related changes in brain connectivity and structure and in patterns of brain activation are associated with age-related changes in cognitive abilities.
This book emphasizes the relationship between learning and decision-making, arguing that the best way to understand how and why decisions are made is in the context of the learning and knowledge acquisition which precedes them, and the feedback which follows. The mechanisms of learning and the structure of environments in which decisions are made are carefully examined to explore their impact on our choices. The authors then consider whether we are all constrained to fall prey to cognitive biases, or whether, with sufficient exposure, we can find optimal decision strategies and improve our decision-making. The book also emphasizes on the practical applications of much of the research on decision-making.
This book provides an overview of recent and ongoing developments in the science of false memory. World-leading researchers unpick questions about flawed recollections, discussing issues as varied as the reliability of highly emotional memories, why we sometimes begin to remember fictional experiences that we have deliberately fabricated, and what happens when we stop believing our memories. This book also draws attention to the broad range of real-life contexts in which such distortions might arise and their potential consequences. It illustrates the ease with which memory can be contaminated and the power of the resulting memory errors, providing an integral text for researchers and students interested in the psychology of memory.
