Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology is one of the areas of specialization in the Experimental Psychology Program. This program provides training in the theoretical issues and research methods of cognitive psychology, while also integrating theory and research in the development of learning and discourse technologies. The program is strongly research-oriented, and offers three major emphases.

1. General cognition. This research emphasis examines the cognitive processes used in the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information from memory, including metacognitive processes in these domains. Within this emphasis, students and faculty collaborate on a number of topics, including:

• memory enhancement strategies
• knowledge and skill acquisition
• metacognitive processes
• emotions and motivation
• working memory processes
• self-regulatory processes
• individual differences
• computational modeling

2. Psycholinguistics and discourse. This emphasis involves the processes and knowledge structures used in understanding and producing written and spoken language. A related goal is to better understand comprehension processes at all ages. Topics of interest in this area include:

• discourse processing
• pragmatics and sociolinguistics
• conversation and dialogue
• learning from text
• learning from multimedia
• figurative language
• question answering
• corpus linguistics
• text coherence
• multimodal communication

3. Learning technologies. In this emphasis, faculty and students investigate how recent developments in computer science and computational modeling can be applied to learning, particularly the learning of complex domains of knowledge (e.g., physics, biology). The overarching goal of this research is to apply principles of cognitive science to educational practice via technology to create automated learning environments. Research topics include:

• intelligent tutoring systems
• multimedia and hypermedia
• human-computer interaction
• artificial intelligence
• natural language processing
• human-to-human tutoring
• computational linguistics
• individual differences in learning

Training in this program integrates theory and data from all three emphases. Training also draws upon the Institute for Inteligent Systems (IIS), an active cognitive science research community, which includes faculty from the Departments of Psychology, Computer Science, Education, Educational Technology, Engineering, Mathematical Sciences, and Physics. We have a highly active and interactive program with two meetings per week, the Cognitive Brownbag Series on Monday’s at noon, and the Cognitive Science Seminar on Wednesdays in the afternoon.

Required Courses  

Meeting schedule

Faculty
(Primary Affiliates)
Roger Azevedo, Ph.D.
Rick Dale, Ph.D.
Barry Gholson, Ph.D.
Arthur C. Graesser, Ph.D.
Xiangen Hu, Ph.D.
Roger Kreuz, Ph.D.
Max Louwerse, Ph.D.
Danielle McNamara, Ph.D.

(Secondary Affiliates)
David Houston