Cognitive pychology and decision making

The course consists of workshops and lectures in two related fields:

Cognitive Psychology: Here, we focus on people’s mental processes, in particular: how do people acquire, process, store and use information? How do people understand the world, and how is their behavior guided by their perceptions and thoughts? Some topics that will be included are: How can we study mental processes? Can we mathematically model mental processes? How do we store our experiences in our memory? How do we retrieve information from our memory? How can we use technology to support our cognitive processes?

Decision Making: This comprises the study of how people form subjective judgments and choose between alternatives. Topics are: What is a rational choice? Are people rational decision makers? How do people make judgments and decisions under uncertainty? How do people choose with known probabilities? How do they choose between alternative options? How do external factors (context, emotions) influence decision making? How does decision making evolve over time? How can we measure and influence subjective judgments and preferences? How can technology support decision making with tools such as decision aids?

In the lectures the following topics are discussed:

Cognition:

• Recognition
• Attention (divided / selective attention, consciousness)
• Working memory and long-term memory (encoding and retrieval)
• Memory strategies
• Mental imagery and cognitive maps
• Knowledge representation and network models
• Producing and understanding language
• Problem solving and logic

Decision Making:

• Rationality

• Judgments

• Heuristics and biases

• Confidence, covariation and causation

• Risk and uncertainty (Utility Theory and Prospect theory)

• Preference and Choice

• Defaults, nudges and choice architectures

• Intertemporal choice

• Intuition & Reflective thinking (Two systems)

In the workshops the students will learn to apply the theories discussed in the lectures to technology, and – vice versa - identify how technology may be used to test these theories. The workshops will be followed by short writing assignments, and will help students to develop professional skills.

After this course, the student is able to:

• classify the most important theoretical approaches in Cognitive Psychology and Decision Making, the recent developments, and the scientific research on which these theories are based.
• judge boundary conditions of each theoretical approach in Cognitive Psychology and Decision Making.
• analyze differences between each of the theoretical approaches, Cognitive Psychology and Decision Making.
• integrate the theoretical approaches in Cognitive Psychology and Decision Making, to applications in the technological domain.
• formulate an argument-backed opinion based on the course material.

You must meet the following requirements

• Registered for a degree programme other than
• HBO-TOP Applied Physics, Pre-Master
• Completed none of the course modules listed below
• Cognitive Science and AI (JBC000)

• Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)
• Cognition, 11th edition (Thomas A. Farmer and Margaret W. Matlin), Wiley custom (ISBN 978-1119891710)
• Additional scientific articles for the workshops.