University of Cambridge-Cognitive Science and Behavioral Psychology

Program Background

Psychology is a science that studies human psychological phenomena and their mental functions and behavioral activities under their influence, taking into account outstanding theory and application (practice). Psychology includes basic psychology and applied psychology, whose research involves many fields such as perception, cognition, emotion, thinking, personality, behavior habits, interpersonal relations, social relations, artificial intelligence, IQ, personality and so on. It is also related to many fields of daily life — family, education, health, society and so on.

Cognitive science is a new interdisciplinary discipline including linguistics, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and artificial intelligence. Its research object is the understanding and cognition of human, animal and artificial intelligence mechanism, that is, the complex system of information processing that can acquire, store and transmit knowledge. With the development of technology, especially the rapid development of artificial intelligence in recent years, new ideas have been brought to the research and application of cognitive psychology. The ecological behavior data obtained by artificial intelligence and big data improves the internal and external validity of the research results.

Program Description

The project aims to introduce students to the frontier of psychology research — human cognitive science, mainly including the basic theory of the discipline and the overview of the research field. The program will focus on guiding students to explore topics such as human perception, attention, long and short term memory, cultivate students’ critical thinking, and encourage students to actively connect what they have learned with other scientific research fields.

Psychology topics and lesson plans include:

1) Prejudice and Discrimination (implicit bias)

2) Philosophy of Identity (Economic Theory of the Individual and Philosophy of the Self)

3) Psychological experiments, data collection and analysis, and design

4) Sessions on critical thinking and scientific writing

5) Overview of Theory of Mind (TOM)

6) Dual processes of human cognition and priming and Stroop tasks