Cognitive Psychology Program

 

Program description: 

  • Cognitive psychology is the study of thought, and of human information processing.  Cognitive psychologists investigate the mental processes that allow human beings (and sometimes animals) to perceive the world around them, call upon memorial representations to guide their decisions, use their body to navigate their environment, and much more.  These processes include things like attention, perception, memory, reasoning, language, decision-making, and much else.
  • We encourage our students to take advantage of the department's other strengths in Engineering and Social Psychology. Many of our students further diversify their skills by taking internships.
  • Careers in cognitive psychology include academia, research, medicine, user-experience, technology, etc, etc etc.  Our recent graduates have been employed by LIST.

 

These domains of investigation have particularly strong representation.

  • Visual attention and attention control.
  • Memory and learning.
  • Cognitive neuroscience.

 

Basic areas of research include:

  • Individual differences in cognitive abilities.
  • Motor learning.
  • Attention.
  • Visual search.
  • Cognitive neuroscience.
  • Perception.
  • Long-term memory and working-memory.

 

The Cognitive Program at New Mexico State University has several distinctive features:

  • The program faculty are highly-respected and well known in their fields.  Its members serve as editors of major journals (links), they are recipients of major awards (links),and they bring in research funding each year (links).
  • The faculty (and students) are highly collaborative within the department and across the university.  And these collaborations also include researchers at other institutions within the United States and abroad.
  • Many of the faculty and students in the program have interest in both basic and applied research.  This involves creation of fundamental and discovery science projects but also those directed at (or inspired by) real-world problems.

 

Cognitive Program Faculty