Lecture Topics 1A

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Lectures will be recorded this semester. Lecture material and associated learning materials and readings can all be found in Learn. You can find out more about the topics covered in 1A by clicking the links below.

Doing Psychology

Psychology is typically described as ‘the scientific study of the mind’. But how can you observe and measure mental phenomena? These lectures will introduce you to various ways in which psychologists have studied the mind from a scientific perspective.

The Doing Psychology component is broken into two parts taking place at the beginning of each teaching block - in week 1 and after the mid-semester break in week 7 respectively.

WEEK 1: DOING PSYCHOLOGY

The Psychology of Memory

These six lectures will focus on how human memory works, including your memory. They will include what is known about memory from scientific studies, and how you can apply the understanding of memory to improve how you use your own memory, how to enhance your own study and learning at university, and in so doing reduce exam stress across all of the courses that you take, not just for Psychology.

Perception

These lectures consider why the world seems like it does to us. We will explore the field of perception, focusing mainly on vision, from the low-level firing of sensory receptors, through the perception of complex forms in 3D space, to visual attention and the use of vision to guide action.

Learning

The study of animal learning was a cornerstone of psychology from the 1930s to the 1970s and is as relevant now for understanding humans as it was back then for studying animals. This module will provide an introduction to classical and instrumental conditioning and related topics. It will also introduce preparedness and other areas of learning theory that are at the intersection of the evolutionary history of a species and how it interacts with the environment.

Cognitive Neuroscience: From Neuron to Higher Order Cognition

We are biological creatures, and the mind is the product of brain structure and function. This is why psychologists are interested in brains - or, more generally, in the nervous system that enables us to perceive the world around us, process information, and control the way we move and interact with our environment.