Lecture by lecture topics and readings

[ Lecture: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 ]


I am not the one teaching this course this year... For information about this course, please check the official syllabus on the UoE Psychology website. This site only exists for archiving purpose and contains a copy of the material made available in 2004-2005.

Lecture slides are now available on the tutorials.lexicall.org/wiki/ website, in the Lecture slides, file gallery section (files 24-29).



Copies of the slides will be made available after each lecture, in different formats (powerpoint presentation; pdf document with 2 slides per page, with colours; pdf document with 4 slides per page, with a grayscale display.

Trouble opening some of these documents? To view "pdf" files, you can download a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader. To view "pps" files, download a free copy of Powerpoint viewer



1. Introduction

How Cognitive Psychology differs from earlier approaches in Psychology.

How connectionist and "theory-checking" computer modelling, neuropsychology and experimental psychology can all contribute to cognitive psychology.

[ slides: Powerpoint Show (2.5MB) | 2 per page, colour (0.7 MB) | 4, b&w (0.6 MB) ]

  • Chapter 1 of Eysenck & Keane
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2. Selective Attention

How the dichotic listening paradigm can be used to study auditory attention, and some of the resulting data.

How psychologists have conceived of the focusing of visual attention, and how they have tried to investigate it.

How attention can be impaired after brain injury.

[ slides: Powerpoint Show (1.1 MB) | 2 per page, colour (0.6 MB) | 4, b&w (0.5 MB) ]

  • Eysenck & Keane, chapter 5 (Attention and performance limitations)
  • See also Anderson, chapter 3 (Attention and performance)
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3. Divided Attention

How psychologists have tried to investigate the division of attention, and some of the resulting data.

How the Stroop task lets psychologists investigate automaticity; the difference between automatic and controlled processing.

[ slides: Powerpoint Show (0.6 KB) | 2 per page, colour (0.7 MB) | 4, b&w (0.5 MB) ]

  • Eysenck & Keane, chapter 5 (Attention and performance limitations)
  • See also Anderson, chapter 3 (Attention and performance)
  •  (same as previous lecture)
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4. Recognising Visual Stimuli I

What template theorists of visual object recognition claim.

How psychologists have explored the topic of Òtop-downÓ effects on cognition.

[ slides: Powerpoint Show (5 MB!!!) | 2 per page, colour (880 KB) | 4, b&w (800 KB) ]

  • EK, chapter 4, "Object recognition" (was chapter 3 in the 1995 edition)
  • See also Anderson, chapter 2 (Perception)
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5. Visual and Auditory Word Recognition

How the Interactive-Activation Model of visual lexical processing works.

What might constitute context effects in visual word recognition, and how we might theorise about them.

What categorical perception is, and why it is important in speech processing.

How the TRACE model of auditory word recognition works.

[ slides: Powerpoint Show (1.4 MB) | 2 per page, colour (450 KB) | 4, b&w (650 KB) ]

  • EK, chapter 4 "object recognition" and chapter 11 "Language comprehension" (were chapter 4 and 12, respectively, in the 1995 edition)
  • See also Anderson, chapter 2 (Perception)
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6. Mental representations

Paivio's Dual Coding theory and some of the arguments for and against it.

The difference between prepositional and imagistic encoding and how psychologists might investigate the relationships between them.

[ slides: Powerpoint Show (1.2 MB) | 2 per page, colour (600 KB) | 4, b&w (600 KB) ]

  • EK, chapter 9: knowledge, propositions and images.
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© Marielle Lange (M.Lange@ed.ac.uk),