Simplified Edition · Module 01

Cognitive Psychology

Attention, memory and judgement: what the system does with limited capacity, and what that costs.

  • 12 activities
  • 5 to 7 minutes each
  • 72 minutes end to end
A valid cue shortens the response Two boxes either side of a fixation cross, with the left one cued and holding the target. Below, two response bars: the bar for a validly cued target is about half the length of the bar for an invalidly cued one. Valid cue Invalid cue
A cue in the right place gets you there sooner. The first activities measure that difference.

The activities

In teaching order

  1. Posner Spatial Cueing

    Moving attention without moving the eyes, and why a cueing effect is two effects rather than one

    6 min

  2. Visual Search Laboratory

    Why the slope of a search function matters more than how fast anyone was

    6 min

  3. Inattentional Blindness

    Attention, awareness, and an object in plain view that goes unreported

    5 min

  4. Change Blindness

    Why a quarter-second of blank makes a large obvious change nearly impossible to find

    6 min

  5. Attentional Blink

    The few hundred milliseconds after finding one target in which a second one is not seen

    7 min

  6. Stroop Interference Laboratory

    Colour-word interference, and why a neutral baseline turns one effect into two

    6 min

  7. What Got Through

    What survives from a stream you are ignoring, and what the selection theories were built to explain

    5 min

  8. Dual-Task Capacity Laboratory

    What doing two easy things at once actually costs, measured against your own baseline

    7 min

  9. Working-Memory Load Laboratory

    Why what you are doing in between matters as much as how much you are holding

    7 min

  10. Remembering a Word Nobody Said

    How a word that was never presented gets remembered confidently, and attributed to someone

    6 min

  11. Decision Framing Laboratory

    How the same outcomes described two ways produce opposite choices

    5 min

  12. Two Things Called Attention

    What the operation called attention actually computes, and why sharing a name is not sharing a mechanism

    6 min

Elsewhere

Every activity here has a full-length twin in the main collection, linked from the foot of the activity itself.