PSY270H1 Chapter 1: Introduction

• School: UTSG
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY270H1
• Professor: Christine Millicent Burton

Document Summary

Cognition: the sum of all intelligent mental activities; acquiring and processing information about the world in order to make behavioral decisions. Two broad reasons why people want to understand the mind and brain. Basic research: the scientific research whose goal is to try to understand the world and its phenomena without regard to a specific end-use of this knowledge. Goal is to understand who we humans are as a species and what makes us tick. Applied research: the research is concerned with the end goal of developing a solution to a problem. Ex: some cognitive research is concerned with the pathology of cognitive function due to developmental disorders (e. g. autism), brain trauma or disease. One of the best ways to gauge how much we understand what the brain does is to assess how well we are able to build artificial devices that can produce its behavior.