Psychology - Memory and Cognition - Revised 2018

The Psychology - Memory and Cognition course begins by reviewing the process of visual perception which involves the selection, organisation and interpretation of information. You will learn about reception which is the process of receiving electromagnetic energy from the environment at the site of the visual receptor cells called rods and cones. The course describes other topics such as the Gestalt principles that include figure-ground, closure, similarity, and proximity; convergence, a primary binocular depth cue where the eyes turn inward to focus on an object so that a single image is formed on both retinas; and examples of illusions including the Muller-Lyer illusion, ames-room, ponzo, and the moon illusion.

Next, the course teaches you about memory which involves an active, information-processing system that receives, organises, stores and recovers information. You will learn about memory strategies such as a mnemonic device, narrative chaining, acrostics and acronyms. The course describes how for information to be successfully memorised and retrieved for later use, it goes through the encoding, storage, and retrieval stages. You will learn that long-term memory is highly organised into four types: declarative, procedural, semantic, and episodic. Finally, the course reviews memory loss which can be due to biological or organic causes.

The course describes different types of memory loss such as organic amnesia, anterograde amnesia, retrograde amnesia, and Alzheimer’s disease which is the most common cause of dementia. This course will be of great interest to learners who are interested in a career in psychology and would like to learn more about psychological aspects of memory and cognition.