Winner of the Most promising New Textbook award for 2022, awarded by the Textbook & Academic Authors Association!

Explore this vibrant and dynamic field through hands-on activities, thought-provoking experiments, and everyday applications

Cognition

Marvin M. Chun
Steven B. Most

About the Book

Chun and Most’s Cognition brings new, modern vitality to course materials by presenting exciting findings from cognitive psychology in a way that students can easily grasp. Highlighting everyday-life applications, Cognition motivates students to share in the excitement of cognitive psychology through highly relevant examples, discussions, and demonstrations. Its engaging prose and pedagogical features, such as "Think for Yourself" and "See for Yourself," immerse students in the process of scientific discovery.

This comprehensive text presents both classic and contemporary research, emphasizing conceptual understanding and lifelong discovery. In addition, the authors integrate exciting new topic areas such as emotion and highlight essential connections to social, clinical, and developmental psychology. A robust multimedia package extends discovery through high-quality demonstrations (Discovery Labs), videos, and quizzing tools to help students succeed. Cognition and its accompanying resources, including the test bank, can be integrated directly into instructors’ learning management systems to save time and simplify access.

About the Authors

Marvin M. Chun is the Richard M. Colgate Professor of Psychology at Yale University, with secondary appointments in the Cognitive Science Program and the Yale School of Medicine Department of Neuroscience. He received his Ph.D. in brain and cognitive sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed by postdoctoral training at Harvard University. Professor Chun leads a cognitive neuroscience laboratory that uses functional brain imaging and machine learning to decode and predict how people see, attend, remember, and perform optimally. His research has been honored with a Troland Award from the US National Academy of Sciences, an early-career award from the American Psychological Association, and a Ho-Am Science Prize from Samsung (South Korea). His teaching has been recognized with both the Lex Hixon ’63 Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Social Sciences and the Phi Beta Kappa William Clyde DeVane Medal for Distinguished Scholarship and Teaching in Yale College.  


Steven B. Most is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia (UNSW Sydney), with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware. He received his B.A in psychology at Brandeis University and Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University, followed by postdoctoral training at Vanderbilt and Yale Universities. Dr. Most leads the Motivated Attention & Perception Lab, where his team uses behavioral and physiological measures to understand how attention, motivation, and emotion shape what people see, remember, and do, as well as how cognition affects safety and wellbeing in the real world (e.g., road safety). Dr. Most’s research has been recognized through grants, fellowships, and awards from NIH, the Australian Research Council, and the New York Academy of Sciences, and with an appointment as Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. His teaching and mentoring have been recognized with the Alpha Lambda Delta Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Delaware and an Outstanding Postgraduate Supervisor Award at UNSW.


Before writing Cognition, Professors Chun and Most collaborated on research examining how emotional stimuli capture attention.

Table of Contents

Part I: Foundations of Cognitive Psychology


Chapter 1. What is Cognitive Psychology?
Chapter 2. Cognitive Neuroscience


Part II: Encoding the World around Us


Chapter 3. Perception and Mental Imagery
Chapter 4. External Attention
Chapter 5. Cognitive Control and Working Memory

Part III: Representing Knowledge


Chapter 6. Everyday Memory

Chapter 7. Memory Systems
Chapter 8. Language

Part IV: Thinking in a Complex World


Chapter 9. Judgment and Decision Making
Chapter 10. Reasoning and Problem Solving
Chapter 11. Knowledge, Intelligence, & Cognitive Development
Chapter 12. Social Cognition

Discovery Labs

Discovery Labs offer a wide variety of interactive experiments, exercises, and animations designed to help students understand important concepts and principles. Discovery Labs brings cognition to life, allowing students to act as researchers and test subjects by giving them the ability to participate in experiments and to analyze and share results.

List of Discovery Labs

Apparent Motion
Attentional Blink
The Brown-Peterson Paradigm
Change Blindness
Colour Vision
Dual-Task Interference Encoding Task
Dual-Task Interference Perceptual Refractory Period Paradigm
Encoding Specificity
False Memory
The Illusory Truth Effect
Lateral Inhibition
Lexical Decision-making
Memory Schemas
Memory Span
Mental Rotation
Motion Induced Blindness
Operation Span
The Ponzo Illusion
Psycholinguistics
Reasoning with Probability

Receptive Fields
Risky Decision Making
Semantic Priming
Serial Position Effect
Spatial Cueing
Sternberg Search
Synaptic Transmission
The Reicher-Wheeler Paradigm
The Simon Effect
The Speed-Accuracy Trade-Off
The Sperling Partial Report Paradigm: Iconic Memory
The Stroop Effect
Top-Down Processing of Colour Information
The 2-4-6 Task
The Wason Task
The Word Frequency Effect
Visual Search
Von Restorff Effect

Features and Demonstrations

See for Yourself demonstrations describe an activity or mental trick students can try

Think for Yourself boxes provide an in-depth look at interesting subjects relevant to the chapter content

Sample Videos

Man with a 7 Second Memory Still Plays the Piano but Doesn't Know How

A Veteran Copes with PTSD: Brandon's Story

Videos and Webinars

Contemporary Research

Research Focus boxes highlight cutting-edge research studies, explaining methodology and results

Praise for Cognition

This textbook has a fresh feel to it with respect to the selection of topics, scholarly quality, and presentation style. The writing is clear, engaging, and at appropriate level of complexity for an introductory text. The chapters are informative and fun to read."

– Shahram Ghiasinejad, University of Central Florida

The text is very well organized and covers the relevant material in a compelling manner. The language chapter, which in most cognitive psychology texts does not present a full picture of psycholinguistics, is particularly comprehensive and tells an interesting story.”

– Louisa Slowiaczek, Bowdoin College

The book is very accessible and presents a refreshed view of cognitive psychology. The integration of real world examples is specific strength that makes this book stand out.”

– Arturo Hernandez, University of Houston

This text is accessible, yet comprehensive and challenging. The concepts are organized well, and explanations strike a balance that is not overly simplified nor excessively detailed.”

– Brandi Emerick, Indiana University

This textbook is well organized and well written. It has a good combination of classic, groundbreaking, and recent research. Students will find the textbook easy to comprehend and a pleasure to read.”

– Robert Hines, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

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Cognition is available in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Copyright © Oxford University Press 2024

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