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