Watch and learn! Carefully selected media links will help bring key concepts and theories to life, preparing you for your studies and exams. 

Click on the following links which will open in a new window.

Video Links

• Language: the Nativist/Empiricist Debate
  A 4-minute video that introduces the nativist/empiricist debate as it applies to language, including modern cognitive psychology viewpoints.

• Behaviorism

  • Watson and Rayner’s conditioning of “Little Albert.”

  • Sheldon’s attempt to condition Penny on “The Big Bang Theory.”

• Stone Age Minds: A conversation with evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.
  A 10-minute interview regarding the evolutionary origins of the architecture of the human mind.

Audio Links

• “Less than human”: The Psychology of Cruelty.
  This interview with cognitive scientist David Livingstone Smith covers cognitive aspects of the dehumanization process, which allows people to commit cruel acts against other human beings and even genocide. Livingstone Smith is director of the Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of New England.

• Are Math Skills Built In to the Human Brain?
  Nature versus nurture: Two psychologists discuss studies that suggest that math skills may be hard-wired into the human brain.

• “Brain Bugs”: Cognitive Flaws that “Shape Our Lives”
  Neuroscientist Dean Buonomano talks about why our brains sometimes fail us, from an evolutionary perspective, because we live in a time and place that we did not evolve to live in.

Web Resources

• Perceptual Psychology: Nativism vs. Empiricism
  This website provides an interesting look at studies which favor nativism or empiricism in the development of perceptual abilities.
  Follow-up exercise: Divide students into teams and have each team do further internet research on the five ways in which psychologists have attempted to answer the nature/nurture question: by studying human babies, by studying cataract patients, by studying animals, by studying different cultures, and by studying adaptation.

• The Gestalt Principles
  This graphic design website presents some great illustrations of the Gestalt principles of similarity, continuation, closure, proximity, and figure/ground.
  Follow-up exercise: Ask students to generate their own examples of each Gestalt principle.

• Psychology Research Methods, by Saul McLeod (2007)
  A simple table presentation of the most popular research methods in psychology.
  Follow-up exercise: Give students a particular hypothesis or question (for example, “what is the effect of energy drinks on memory?”). Divide students into groups and ask each group to design a particular type of research study to address the hypothesis. When groups have finished, discuss the pros and cons of each design.
  Follow-up exercise: Ask students to generate additional examples of ways that people use math accurately in the real world (buying enough wrapping paper for a gift, deciding how many cookies will feed a child’s party, and so forth).

• Cognition Laboratory Experiments
  This is the home page for a set of experiments developed by John H. Krantz of Hanover College. They simulate a variety of tasks in perception, attention, memory, mental imagery, language, and decision making.
  Follow-up exercise: For chapter 1, you might wish to pick one experiment and run it in class. Each experiment features several variables that students and instructors can choose to vary, such as the number and nature of trials. As such, this page could be a good resource for classroom activities focused on the experimental method in cognitive psychology.