Basic Cognitive Psychological Skills

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This course focuses on the acquisition and training of basic skills required in cognitive performance research. The course is centred around a psychological experiment in which students study the detrimental effects of arousal manipulation (environmental noise) on cognitive processing. Students will learn how to perform a field experiment and will undertake all the various stages that are necessary to acquire and analyse the data and report on the results. Students will be required to recruit a small number of subjects and to administer the test battery according to a pre-defined protocol. The test battery consists of paper and pencil tests that have been presented and discussed in previous courses. After data acquisition, a number of interactive sessions are planned in which students not only learn to explore and analyse their data with SPSS but also lean how to interpret the results. Students conclude the course by writing a journal style paper in APA format describing the experiment. Particular attention will be given to predicting and explaining the results within a theoretical perspective and comparing them with previous findings. An overview of the techniques and tests currently used to evaluate performance in a number of cognitive domains (such as language, perception, attention and executive functions), are also presented to students in this course.