Attention and Memory

This course will focus on how people take in information about the world around them, store that information, and retrieve it to help them solve problems. In doing so, we will discuss the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that we take in and interpret a great deal of our environment but that we also fail to notice much of it. We will also discuss how we are able to work on and manipulate the information we have taken in, and make decisions based on it, emphasizing the impact that this process has on our ability to perform many cognitive tasks. Additionally, those factors that influence how and how well we encode and later retrieve various types of information will be considered.