This course is designed to provide you with an introduction to research methods.  Its primary goals are to: (1) teach you the basics of designing, conducting, and communicating psychological research; (2) encourage you to become a critical consumer of basic and applied research; (3) provide you with hands-on research experience; and (4) teach you the basics of using information technology to conduct research and to interpret and present research results.  Although the emphasis will be on the application of methodological principles to research problems in various areas of psychology (e.g., social, clinical, and cognitive psychology), we will also consider the implications of methodological principles for “real world” research issues.

This course is designed to provide you with an introduction to cognitive psychology, which is the branch of science that is attempting to understand the human mind (e.g., thought, language, memory, etc.).  Apart from being intrinsically interesting (who isn’t interested in understanding how their own mind works?), there are many practical reasons for taking this course.  For example, cognitive psychology is the dominant theoretical perspective in modern psychology (much like behaviorism was up until the 1960’s), and so many of the basic principles that are important in other fields (e.g., education, clinical psychology, etc.) are based upon what has been learned about the human mind from cognitive psychology.  Moreover, what is learned in this course – how the mind works – may also have more direct and personal payoffs (e.g., by showing you how to study more efficiently).

This course will provide an introduction to computational modeling in cognitive psychology.  The main goals of this course are to foster both a basic understanding of the different approaches to modeling and an appreciation of the practical and philosophical issues related to modeling.  The first part of the course will focus on the following questions: (1) What are computational models of cognition?; (2) What are the major approaches (e.g., production systems) that are used to model cognitive processes?; (3) How are models developed and used in research?; and (4) How are models evaluated?  The second part of the course will examine these issues in more depth by comparing models that have been developed to account for phenomena in specific areas of cognitive research (e.g., episodic memory).  The third part of the course will consist of student-led discussions of seminal modeling papers from the students’ areas of research.  During the final part of the course, students will complete a modeling project or write a critique/review of existing models within their area of research.  Although this class assumes no prior knowledge of modeling, basic math proficiency and some minimal knowledge of computer programming are necessary.