Cognition 101: How We Acquire Knowledge, Gain Understanding, and Make Decisions

Learn practical, easy-to-apply tips to improve your thinking, reasoning, and decision making with an NIH-funded cognitive science professor and textbook author. Cognitive psychology—the science of how we acquire, process, store, and use information—is essential to understanding the human experience. Yet cognition is such an automatic part of our daily functioning that we rarely take time to think about how it works or how we might improve it. In 12 illuminating audio lectures, Carleton College professor Kathleen Marie Galotti will take you on a tour of higher-order cognitive processes such as problem-solving, creativity, reasoning, and decision making—in other words, how we put information to use. As you examine the basic cognitive processes of perception, attention, and memory, you’ll see that all human beings—even highly intelligent and motivated ones—have limited cognition. Moreover, our perceptions are limited by our expectations, our current context, and even our cultural background. The author of two textbooks on cognition as well as the book Making Decisions That Matter: How People Face Important Life Choices, Prof. Galotti is known for her ability to break down complex information into digestible pieces and make it relevant to everyday life. Through this course, you’ll benefit from Prof. Galotti’s cutting-edge research on cognition and gain real-world applications that will strengthen your own cognitive processes. This course is part of the Learn25 collection and includes a PDF study guide.