Research
Cognitive psychology - what is it all about?
Cognitive psychology investigates the principles of human experience and behaviour, especially those that apply to a broader population. It examines how we take in, process and store information to guide action and shape conscious experience, across domains such as attention, consciousness, perception, learning, emotion, language, thinking, decision-making, problem-solving, memory and motivation.
As both a basic and an applied science, cognitive psychology seeks to describe, explain and predict behaviour and experience. Increasingly, it also aims to understand their biological (physiological and anatomical) foundations. Applications include human-technology interaction and ergonomics, learning in schools and workplaces, and targeted support for mental health.
The field is firmly empirical, drawing on methods such as laboratory experiments (primarily with humans), recordings of central and peripheral nervous activity (EEG, fMRI), behavioural observation, introspection and computational simulations or mathematical modelling of mental processes.
The research conducted by the Cognitive Psychology Vienna group focuses on perception and attention.
What we do – focus on perception and attention
Why do we sometimes find it so difficult to focus on what is relevant and so hard to ignore what is irrelevant? Some perceptions and ideas occupy our consciousness, while others seem to lie just below the surface of our awareness. What rules govern this mesh of experience? How is the labour of mental processing organised?
We investigate these questions by conducting psychological experiments with human participants, using psychophysical tasks, eye tracking and electroencephalography.
Dive deeper into our research topics and meet our team shaping them.
