Cursos / 1º Ciclo / Institute of Psychology and Educational Sciences :: Psychology

PSICOLOGIA COGNITIVA - 2025/2026

1º curricular year
Semestralidade: 2nd semester
ECTS: 6

Teachers

Leading Teacher: Prof. Doutora Joana Gonçalves Lopes
Assistant Professor: Prof. Doutora Joana Gonçalves Lopes

Class type and School hours

Orientação Tutorial : 1 Horas
Teórico-prática : 2 Horas

Teaching Language

Portuguese

Main Aims/Objectives

Present and discuss general knowledge and concepts in the fields of Perception, Attention,
and Human Memory.
Develop research skills based on experimental methodology, through the
method of replicating experiments on the topics covered in class.
Understand and critically analyze the contributions of Cognitive Psychology to the fields of Perception, Attention, and Human Memory.

Specific Aims/Objectives

Master experimental methodology in the field of Cognitive Psychology
Develop laboratory work skills in the field of Cognitive Psychology

Skills to be acquired

Research and information integration skills (understanding, analysis, and synthesis)
Oral communication skills (conceptual rigor) and written communication skills (writing scientific reports of experiments and a poster)
Ability to plan, conduct an experiment, and present it to the scientific community (poster preparation and presentation)
Ability to think critically and reflectively

Teaching Procedures

Oral presentation aimed at theoretical deepening and open discussion with students
Participation in experiments in the field of experimental and cognitive psychology and their respective
analysis and discussion of the results obtained

Programme

1. Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
- Cognitive Psychology as a Science
- Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuropsychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Computational Cognitive Science
2. Perception
- Basic Processes in Visual Perception
- Color Vision
- Depth Perception
- Perception Without Consciousness
- Object and Face Recognition
- Pattern Recognition and Perceptual Organization
- Approaches to Object Recognition
- Face Recognition
- Visual Imagery
- Perception, Movement, and Action
- Direct Perception and Visually Guided Action
- Human Movement Perception
3. Attention
- Attention and Performance
- Auditory and Visual Focused Attention
- Cross-Modal Effects
- Divided Attention
- Automatic Processing
4. Memory
- Memory, Learning, and Forgetting
- Working Memory and Its Capacity
- Levels of Processing
- Learning through Recall and Implicit Learning
- Forgetting in Long-Term Memory
- Long-Term Memory Systems
- Declarative and non-declarative memory
- Episodic memory
- Semantic memory
- Autobiographical memory and its approaches
5. Metacognition approach

Evaluation Type

Completion of two written assignments.
Development of a group project on experimental (or semi-experimental) methodology within the following topics: Perception, Attention, and Human Memory (using CogLab Software), with a poster presentation
and writing of a scientific report.

Teaching Resources

Multimedia projector
Computer
Presentations given in theoretical and practical classes (PowerPoint slides)
Computer room that allows for experiments
CogLab software
Scientific articles

Sustainability Objectives

SDG 4: Quality Education and SDG 5: Gender Equality
SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth and SDG 10: Reducing Inequalities

Keywords

Human Cognition
Attention
Human Memory
Perception

Main Bibliography

Complementary Bibliography