It is, for understandable reasons, difficult to hear, ‘What you’re doing is not what you think/say it is.’ A message like this is not likely to evoke a friendly response; it is unlikely to be seen as a friendly remark. In essence, the message does not deny the activity—’Yes, you are doing something’—but rather denies the interpretation assigned to the activity. This is my attitude toward the cognitive/experimental psychology of culture, although I must admit…
Out of the 90 students, these 17 students came to the last lecture (which was an optional make-up session). I admire their choice to attend the lecture despite the absence of any extrinsic incentive, and feel happy to know that at least ~17 students enjoyed my lectures enough to come to this last session. What was unique about the course this semester: We read and discussed the Knowledge Illusion (Sloman & Ferbnach, 2017) together, which…
It was the winter of 2010. My thesis supervisor and I were walking along Otonobee river on the beautiful Trent University campus. The campus looks more beautiful and more dreamy now in my memories, and I am sure its beauty has increased with our distance in time. I told him about my plan for post-graduate studies. He thought I was joking. “What about philosophy?”, he asked. I don’t remember what I said, and I don’t…
Today’s lecture was about narratives. This topic is almost never covered in Cognitive Psychology courses. We did not have it when I took the course in 2008. Even when I took Psychology of Language and Reading Processes we still did not cover narratives. And I believe my experience is representative of the majority. Why most instructors don’t include narratives? The answer can be traced back to Ulrich Neisser’s (1967) classic textbook, which continues to be the dominant…
The following [tentative] sequence of topics differs from the one adopted by most textbook writers and instructors. Usually, we start with a bit of method/history (Week 1), and move to sensation (Week 2), attention (Week 4?), object perception (Week 5?), sometimes followed by action/movement, short-term memory, long-term memory, and so forth. A lot of time is often devoted to debates surrounding object/face perception, top-down/bottom-up attentional control. Usually, there is not much time left for topics…