PSYC 3610 – Lecture 1

hello everyone and welcome to the first lecture of thinking and decision making okay so this is the outline for this lecture it's going to be um a little longer than probably the other lectures will be and part of that is because I got to make sure we're all caught up and we have like the basics of

like the beginning of a psychology course so in my opinion every psychology course should start out with discussing the scientific method and how we conduct science and psychology um and talking about the brain now in this course because it is thinking and decision making which is part of cognitive psychology I'm going to give you a super brief uh history of

cognitive psychology and I think this is important because sometimes we forget how new the field of cognitive psychology is specifically so all this stuff we're learning about thinking and decision making is actually really new and constantly changing and updating okay once I'm done with the basics History Science brain um then we're going to

talk about kind of coar material stuff okay and that that uh have more to do with your actual readings okay now I promise this is going to be super duper brief um and I'll tell you what you should or shouldn't know in terms of names and that kind of thing okay so psychology is a new

science in and of itself all right but within that cognitive psychology is particularly new now initially there were some kind of early Pioneer cognitive psychologists people like d and V and ebing house and William James these are names that you should be familiar with or at least somewhat familiar with um and they are considered

pioneers of cognitive psychology specifically because they were asking questions about like cognition right and they were trying to tap into cognitive abilities now I want you to appreciate how difficult this is because cognition is really hard [Music] to um make concrete right we're talking about things like attention perception memory thinking decision- making problem