PSYC 272 – Selected Topics in Cognitive Psychology

PSYC 272 – Selected Topics in Cognitive Psychology - “Performance Paradigms”

Wednesdays 10-12 in McGill 5240

This course will survey some of the “classic” paradigms and tasks used in Cognitive Psychology, Social Cognition, and Psycholinguistics. These paradigms involve responding as accurately or as quickly as possible in generic knowledge tasks in the face of nominally irrelevant information from primes or distractors. Each week, readings will focus on one of these paradigms, and the goal is to develop a broader perspective that considers the underlying perceptual, attentional, decisional, response, and knowledge representations that are common to these tasks. Examples of these paradigms include lexical-decision, perceptual identification, repetition blindness, “negative priming”, the Implicit Association Test, Attentional Blink, the stop-signal paradigm, and the Eriksen flanker task.

Class Requirements: 2-3 readings each week, attend classes and engage in discussion, writing assignments.

Writing Assignments: At the start of class, turn in a 1-2 page proposal based on that week’s readings. This assignment is intended to provide experience with grant writing, and to improve writing in general. The goal is a concise well formulated proposal. Proposals might be just 2 paragraphs. First, provide a brief description of the experimental paradigm, results, and theories. Second, propose an experiment that can differentiate between existing theories, or perhaps propose a new theory that the experiment will test. This is a substantial amount to cover in a brief report and so you’ll have to choose your words carefully. Bring to class 2 hard copies of your proposal, double spaced. One copy will go to me and the other copy will go to one of the other class members. During the first part of class, you will 1) make correction/suggestion notes on someone else’s proposal; 2) discuss these notes with that student; and 3) discuss the notes that have been made in regard to your proposal. This will also promote subsequent class discussions. Finally, at the end of class, or later that day, you should make the suggested corrections and then e-mail me the final copy of the proposal.

List of Covered Paradigms:

1) Overview of cognitive aftereffects (class meeting 4/2/08)

2) Identification / Recognition

a) Semantic Priming - Lexical Decision (class meeting 4/9/08)

i) Original LD priming paper

ii) Recent LD priming review paper

b) Repetition Blindness (class meeting 4/16/08)

i) Original Kanwisher paper

ii) Kanwisher’s reply to Whittlesea

iii) Whittlesea’s reply to Kanwisher

c) Face Adaptation (class meeting 4/23/08)

i) Webster, Werner, & Field (2005) review chapter