As a cognitive psychology professor, I teach about cognitive networks and how we process, organize, and respond to the world around us. We are able to quickly and flexibly process and categorize items around us, understanding what they are and …
All in For Students
Imitation versus Retrieval Practice in Foreign Language Pronunciation Learning
A couple of months ago I have started re-learning French with a language learning app. I studied French in school for many years and was quite fluent in it at the end of my schooling. Unfortunately, I then stopped speaking or engaging in the language. Fast forward to today...
Mood and Memory
Our brains - that’s the part that does the thinking - are, for better or worse, part of our bodies .... As such there are a vast number of interconnected systems that affect us and our thinking and learning as we move throughout the day. Even your mood can affect your memory and your ability to perform well on an exam.
GUEST POST: A Neuroscientific Perspective on Understanding and Managing Stress
Stress significantly impacts university students, affecting their mental and physical health. There has been a constant rise of mental illnesses reports in UK Universities over the last decade (1) – linked to high academic demands, cost of living and other financial pressures, and social challenges…
Notetaking Formats
One of the most common metaphors to describe what the first few years of medical school is like is that it is like drinking water from a fire hose. There is an overwhelming amount of information that students need to learn, and need to learn fast. One of the areas …
Expert Thinking and AI (Part 2)
The first post in this series gave an overview of Artificial Intelligence - a broad field that seeks to both better understand human cognition through computer models and to improve task-based computer models - and some of the different AI tools that have been developed. These different AI tools have different pros and cons that make them more or less suited to certain tasks. […] In this post I want to explore how generative AI, specifically chatbots, are used and how they affect our thinking and development of expertise.