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Organization, Regulations, and Courses 2025-26


PSYC 51.11 Thinking

Understanding how people think is a central quest in cognitive psychology. The extraordinary human capacity for logic and reason have earned our species the moniker “rational animal”. But research points to a dizzying array of cognitive functions that may come into play when we think. Thought may be infused with emotion, blinded by illusion, relativized by culture, or biased by ideology or self-interest. Thought is framed by mental categories, constrained by selective attention, memory and forgetting, and skewed by the familiar or the novel. In this course, we will examine research on many of these facets of thinking -- from lucidly logical thinking to brazenly irrational thinking to aesthetic thinking that is neither. Along the way, we will consider a range of related issues: slow and fast thinking; conscious and unconscious processing; verbal and spatial thinking; the relationship between thought and language; imagination, creativity, and artistic thinking; attributions of causality; moral thinking; and judgments of people and groups.

We will also touch upon the evolutionary bases for thought and a comparison of human intelligence with artificial intelligence.

Cross Listed Courses

EDUC 059

Prerequisite

PSYC 1 or PSYC 6

Degree Requirement Attributes

Dist:SOC

The Timetable of Class Meetings contains the most up-to-date information about a course. It includes not only the meeting time and instructor, but also its official distributive and/or world culture designation. This information supersedes any information you may see elsewhere, to include what may appear in this ORC/Catalog or on a department/program website. Note that course attributes may change term to term therefore those in effect are those (only) during the term in which you enroll in the course.