Department of Psychology

An introduction to psychology as a science and as a profession.

Introduction to the fundamental principles of psychology, covering particularly the topics of personality, intelligence, emotion, abnormal behavior, attention, perception, learning, memory, and thinking. As part of their learning experience, students participate in psychological experiments.

A survey of psychology as the science of mental life, covering theories and research in perception, reading, attention, consciousness, imagery, memory and its improvement, problem solving, creativity, decision making, and artificial intelligence.

A survey of the relation of brain structure and function to behavior. Topics covered include sensation and perception, the effect of early experience on the growing brain, learning, motivation, sleep and dreaming, language and thought, abnormal behavior and brain injury.

An introduction to how the nervous system controls behavior. Topics include evolution and comparative psychobiology, the neuroscience of sensation and perception, the neuroscience of motivation, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience.

A survey of theories and research about how humans remember information and why they often forget. Topics include research on amnesia, forgetting, and sensory memory systems as well as on practical issues such as how to improve memory.

Brain structure and function underlying sensation, perception, cognition, and arousal. Topics include space, time, color, and pattern recognition, agnesias, agnosias, infant experience, habituation, attention, sleep, dreaming, and consciousness. This course is most accessible to students familiar with natural science concepts.

Neuroanatomical analyses of behavioral functions. Topics include movement, sexual behavior, maternal behavior, hunger, thirst, emotion, pain; addiction, biological rhythms, memory, evolution of the brain, language, hemispheric specialization, brain damage, brain remodeling during development and aging, correlates of cognitive processing.

Introduction to the neural bases of complex human mental abilities. Emphasis on integrating research from cognitive science, brain-scanning techniques, and the lesion technique. Topics include perception, attention, memory, language, motor control, planning/decision-making and consciousness.

A survey of theory and research on the role of thought processes in social behavior (a combination of social and cognitive psychologies). Topics include causal attribution, person perception, stereotyping, impression formation, event memory, and social judgment.

This course is designed to be a survey course covering a variety of research and theories within the field of cognitive psychology. A number of different topic areas will be reviewed including attention, perception, human memory, knowledge representation, language, problem solving, reasoning, intelligence, skill acquisition, and expertise.

A survey of psychological experiments and theory in consciousness. An emphasis is placed on altered states of consciousness such as dreaming, hypnosis, drug-induced changes in consciousness, and meditation; and comparison with ordinary consciousness is made.

A graduate-level survey of theories and research concerned with the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of information. Topics include amnesia, eyewitness memory, forgetting, developmental trends in memory, related issues in attention, language processing, and problem solving.

An examination of research and theory related to the learning and remembering of prose.

A survey of the integrated neurosciences for nonconcentrators emphasizing human physiological psychology. Neural processes of sensory and motor function, arousal and sleep, motivation, learning and memory, language function, and personality disorders will be presented with selected coverage of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neuropharmacology, and neuroendocrinology. Both normal and pathological functions will be covered. Not intended for students in the neurobiology program.

Selected survey of important problems in the encoding, storage, and retrieval of laboratory and naturalistic events. Prerequisite: Coursework in Human Development, Family Studies and related services.

Surveys research and theory concerned with the nature of the "higher-order" mental processes, including decision making, categorization, problem solving, and language. Fundamental questions regarding the nature of the representations that underlie conceptual and linguistic behavior will be addressed. Permission of instructor required.

Analysis of current research findings in cognitive psychology. Emphasis is upon design of experiments and theoretical unification of existing data. Prerequisite: PSY 60000, 60100.

Cognitive approaches to social psychology. Topics to be covered include attribution theory, impression formation, stereotype formation, perceptual salience, memory for persons and interpersonal events, and the processing of emotionally significant information.