Sign up to Coursera courses for free
This course deals with the fundamentals important in Psychology as a science. Psychology is the study of behavior and the mind. But all of us have tried to understand and predict behavior throughout our lives, first with our parents, then with our peers and teachers, and finally with our friends and co-workers. The difference is that psychological scientists conduct research that discovers the facts about behavior and our minds, so its principles are based on science and not just on intuition and experience. The course covers the fundamentals of learning, memory, motivation, emotion, and how behavior changes as we age. The content of the course has received approval from "Quality Matters", an organization that evaluates on-line courses. The learning outcomes are: (1) Students will be able to recognize and describe major psychological principles of learning; (2) Students will be able to distinguish between different types of memory; (3) Students will be able to describe how motivation and emotion can affect how we behave; and (4) Students will know how cognitive behavior and social behavior develops as we age.
Section 1: Introduction and Learning
This week we will start the course by discussing the methods used by psychologists to determine the facts about behavior and the mind. We will emphasize the experimental method because it allows us to determine causation.
One of the foundation areas in understanding is learning, how we change behavior through experience.This segment of the course will cover the types of learning.
Section 2: Memory
Memory is another important area for understanding the mind.
Section 3: Cognition
Language and Intelligence allow us to engage in complex cognition.
Section 4: Development
We also need to understand how behavior changes as we age. In this section we will discuss how cognitive and social behavior develops. We will also discuss my area of research, how memory changes in old age.