LABORATORY IN HUMAN COGNITION

We will start with methodological issues related to experimental psychology and work our way up from lower-level perceptual aspects of cognition, such as vision and object recognition, and then on to higher-level cognitive abilities. The phenomena that will be illustrated and discussed will concern, among others, perceptual effects, the pop-out effect, the Simon effect, the Stroop effect, but also more recent phenomena illustrating how the cognitive system reacts to social signals and experimental settings with high ecological validity. Considerable effort will be made to keep theory and lab practice in parallel. Basic methodological aspects underlying the different experimental paradigms will also be given strong emphasis. The course will also aim to illustrate the relationship between the different effects investigated in the lab with the way we use cognitive processes in real life.