Wow, thank you. That means a lot!

I'm so glad it helps! :)

Thanks for saying that. It honestly means a lot to me. Glad you find it helpful!

Glad you got something out of it :)

Thanks so much! That means a lot to hear. I'll be adding more videos soon, including one-shots not part of a full course.

Yes, I love this one,too. Can you recommend the other 2 for me as well.thank you very much.

That's so cool! I'm glad you're getting something out of the videos!

haha, this is true - some of the classic studies that're commonly used for examples (usually because of simpler design or being a famous one in that topic) often include some old-fashioned references or details :)

Awesome! I'm glad it's helpful. Good luck with exams -- you've got this!

Not familiar with them specifically, but I'll check them out!

So glad you find it helpful/interesting!

I'm so glad you find it helpful! Thank you for the kind comment -- it made my day!

Good point! I'll try to tackle that in a follow-up video before too long. It's definitely worthy of a video of its own -- lots of cool research on the topic.

haha, it may not point to much about your individual memory ability. For the most part, we talk about a lot of things like this in psychology as overall effects that average out across a large sample of people. So we find an effect when we look at many people, but for one single person, their performance on a particular day (or whether a memory 'clicks' for them) often has more to do with the randomness of that particular day/moment and other factors. So measuring individual memory performance is "noisy", but we can compare groups across different situations to discover these overall patterns and effects.

You make a very good point! As mentioned in the prior video (on this playlist for the course) this is certainly a very brief and simplistic "primer" (as the vid title put it) to get those with minimal or zero neuroanatomical background onto the same page so we can talk about the very basics that are built upon in the later videos of the course playlist. The level of cognitive neuroscience/neuroanatomy in this video is shallow, but gets deeper later. Even then, it's limited for the purposes of this cognitive psychology course (whereas an undergraduate course specifically in neuro or in biological bases of behavior tends to go even deeper, and graduate courses deeper still). I do like your idea of adding some book references and additional resources. It's on my to do list to add for each of my lecture videos, so I'll circle back around to that soon! Thanks!

Thanks!

That's a great question. This video is very much a "preview" video, just hinting at a tiny amount of one might encounter within cognitive psychology as a field. Meant to build a little excitement as a 'teaser' for all the lectures that follow in this introductory course. That said, your question is still solid. Cognitive psychology is one of the areas in psychology that I think has some of the strongest theoretical basis. Not in the sense of a single theory unifying everything about cognition -- the field is broad and has many branches (memory, perception, psycholinguistics, attention, reasoning and decision making, etc.). But within a given branch, like memory, there is a strong theoretical basis. For example, our understanding of semantic memory ("knowledge that X", so to speak) is based on a theory of semantic networks and spreading activation that in turn is understood based on strongly supported theory around associative models (which are mechanistically understood through Hebbian processes in neural activity, long-term potentiation, basically a weighted network constantly updating itself). If you switch to attention, another branch of cognitive psych, there's all sorts of theory and those theories, which in turn make predictions, which in turn lead to updated theory as we gain new data, rule out possibilities, and develop more nuanced and accurate models, including at the neural level (cognitive neuroscience cuts across all fields of cognitive psych, of course). So we get earlier theories like feature integration theory to help solve the binding problem (how to take a bunch of input to a bunch of different sensory receptors and systems and have the brain build a multimodal representation of a unitary object, i.e. binding up the right spatial and temporal sets of input to simulate/guess at/represent/model what's happening out in the world). In judgment and decision making, there's dual process theory and all the work that's come out of that. I could probably go on and list a bunch of theory across a bunch of branches of cognitive psych, but I'll be honest, you have a good impulse here. A lot of the press-release news-making that popularizes the latest psychology finding that lay people run into...that has for quite a while now been heavy on the style of research you brought up: demonstrating "effects" but divorced from the heavy theoretical lifting that is necessary to move forward in the bigger picture. Social priming (an area of social psych) had major issues with this, but all fields of psychology struggle with it to some extent these days (as Paul Meehl was ringing alarms about decades ago, and his arguments are still super relevant!). It comes, I think, from some of the (occasionally perverse) incentives in the way academia is set up, with professors needing to "publish or perish", and when you make something countable (like number of publications) a metric of keeping your job or getting grants or whatever, then people adapt their behavior to the metric. So the goal becomes "get out this next publication so I can be on to the next publication after that" just to stay afloat and survive, when what science really needs is likely many, many fewer (low-quality) publications, and more slow-accrual work. Darwin waited ages to publish -- imagine if he'd felt like he needed to rush the idea to the presses within 6 months of having it. That said, the so-called "replication crisis" has led to some improvements (in terms of trying to fix the signal to noise issue where good studies get buried in all the noise of low-quality studies published by people who need desparately to publish to keep their jobs). We're getting better at not just rewarding any positive finding and keeping null results in the file drawer. We're getting better at not taking any individual study of a new thing seriously until it's been replicated, knowing all the researcher degrees of freedom that may contribute to an initial positive result. We don't take meta-analyses at face value without also checking the extent to which they might be affected by publication bias and other factors (which we can now measure/model). Meanwhile, though, it's much more an issue of journalism and press releases (and the TED talk bullshit) that is still giving the impression of a psychology that's just a bunch of "diverse, unrelated effects". That stuff makes the news, whether it ends up replicating / being true or not (see: power poses, himmicanes, etc., but even the overblown hype around growth mindset, etc.). Meanwhile, there are great psychology researchers and thinkers working hard behind the scenes at slowly building the actual theory and understanding that we have today. You don't see press releases about the debates going back and forth on some minor aspect of a theoretical debate on how to structure some model that tries to account for all the empirical results across a domain, but that's what's happening at conferences and in journal articles all the time. It's just not easy to digest. Hell, I have trouble in this entire introductory course getting across enough of a basic-level understanding to feel like I'd be able to explain some real meaty theory in many areas of cognition, especially given the extent to which neuroscience is tied up with understanding what's going on. Anyway, great question - sorry for the super long-winded answer.

@@thecognitivepsychologist thank you for your expansive answer. I will meditate on it and explore some of mentioned topics.

That's great to hear :) I'm glad it helped!

Glad it was helpful!

Glad it helped! :)

Good point! We could confirm your intuition just by testing a bunch of people randomly assigned to each of those conditions you mentioned (closed vs. open eyes during the countdown)

Glad it helped!