認知心理学 -博士課程の授業(3)

認知心理学は、PsychologyのDepartmentに設置されている授業です。この授業は文字通り、認知心理学の基礎を網羅的に扱います。主なトピックは以下の通り。

• Introduction and Organization
• History of Cognitive Psychology
• Information Processing System
• Perception / Attention
• Pattern Recognition
• Reading / Speech Perception
• Short-term Memory
• Long-term Memory
• Language / Concepts and Decision Making
• Theories and Models, Methodological Issues

自分自身のバックグラウンド的に、認知心理学を学んだことはなく、始めは興味が薄かったのですが、学んでみると結構興味深い授業でした。経営学というのが経済学と認知心理学の延長線上にある学問ということが良く理解できました。

この授業は教科書はなく、毎週論文を大量に読んで授業ではディスカッションという形式でした。また、学期に２回、論文を一つ読んでその著者になりきって研究を発表するというセッションもありました。毎回の授業の準備は、文献購読に加えて質問の答えをまとめたreaction paperの提出が義務づけられています。このreaction paperの設問が非常に良くできていて、文献を深く読み込むために大きく助けられました。ここではそのreaction paperの設問をご紹介します。

• Which best describes the emergence of Cognitive Psychology in the 1960s and 1970s: Cognitive Revolution or Cognitive Resurrection?
• What role does iconic memory play in everyday life?
• How can one best describe how selective attention works?

• If you are interested in studying pattern recognition, are words a good type of stimulus? Why and why not?
• Why might eye movements be more closely linked to cognitive processes during reading than during scene perception and visual search?
• Which is more valuable for understanding how children learn to read: basic research on skilled reading or large scale classroom studies in which there is little control over many variables? Justify your answer.

• What do you think is the capacity of STM? How convincing are Cowan’s arguments?
• If you had to tell your grandmother why she forgets things, what would you tell her?
• What are the primary characteristics of STM?

• To what extent does language and memory influence decision making?
• Following the distinction between competence and performance, psychologists mainly focused on the issue of “psychological reality” (which aspects of language that linguists discuss actually influence how people use language). What do you think about the distinction between competence and performance? To what extent does Ferreira’s research demonstrate competence or performance?

• Trace the flow of information through the cognitive processing system from when the stimulus is first encountered (either via vision or audition) until it gets stored away in long-term memory. This can be done in the context of reading or speech perception. At what point does the nature of the input not matter (i.e., processing becomes the same independent of whether the input is vision or audition)? Also, describe the characteristics of each stage of processing.