Graduate Studies
Cognitive Program
The doctoral program in cognitive psychology prepares students to excel in research and teaching careers.
They become informed about the discipline of psychology generally, master research methodologies and analytic techniques, and gain specialized knowledge about their particular interests.
Our students achieve breadth of knowledge by taking overview courses both within and outside the cognitive program, develop methodological sophistication by engaging in multiple research projects and by completing several research methods and statistics courses, and realize specialized aims by conducting research with faculty members and by taking advanced seminars.
At Notre Dame, doctoral candidates in cognitive psychology can acquire knowledge in the areas of cognition, including human memory, attention, psycholinguistics, perception, sensation, and higher order processes, as well as expertise in experimental methods and quantitative analysis.
Research in these substantive areas stresses issues in memory retrieval, spatial cognition, language production and comprehension, music cognition, visual and auditory processing, attention, and aging. A sophisticated array of methodologies are used, including eye tracking, event-related potentials, and psychophysical scaling. This combination of experiences prepares students for postdoctoral careers in university, industry, and government settings.
Cognition and Memory
Research programs in this discipline emphasize memory, language, and attention. Specific areas include exploring the use of situation models in language comprehension and memory retrieval, how spatial knowledge is mentally represented and used in memory tasks, text comprehension, memory for music across different hearings, and issues of cognitive aging having to do with memory and attention.
Perception
Research programs in perception and its links to other domains such as attention, language, memory, and psychophysics are emphasized. Specific areas include the nature of attentional control, orientation effects in object recognition, perceptual organization, and the selection and use of reference frames to coordinate perception and language. In addition, eye-movement research focuses on identifying parameters of the memory that survives from one eye fixation to the next. Finally, the experimental assessment of various theories of psychological scaling and measurement is highlighted.
Language
Research programs in language focus on the production and comprehension of spoken language. Specific areas include the effect of prosodic factors on speech segmentation and word recognition, the encoding of grammatical dependencies during sentence production, the mapping of spatial relations onto linguistic expressions, and the interaction between lexical-syntactic and discourse processes in the establishment of reference during conversational interactions.
Innovative methodologies involving eye tracking and virtual reality are being developed to explore the integrative aspects of language use with other cognitive abilities, such as visual-spatial perception, spoken and gestural action, problem-solving, attention, and memory, thus opening up new avenues of exploration that extend beyond the traditional boundaries of psycholinguistic research. This interdisciplinary approach to studying language processing is further promoted by an emphasis on the computational modeling of empirical data.
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