Applied Cognitive Psychology

There are plenty of books about cognitive psychology, but few of them deal specifically with the application of cognitive psychology in real-life settings. This seems rather surprising, but it probably reflects the fact that applied cognitive psychology is a relatively new science, which has only become a major research area over the past 20 or 30 years. However, it is now beginning to be accepted that cognitive psychologists really do have something useful to say about cognitive performance in real-life situations.

We have added several new topics, new chapters on perceptual errors and accidents, and on the influence of emotion on cognitive performance. There are also new chapters on cognitive factors in music, and in sport. This book therefore covers all of the major areas of cognitive psychology, including attention, perception, working memory, long-term memory, thinking and decision making. In addition, we consider the effects of several factors (e.g. drugs, biological cycles, emotion, music) on all of these cognitive processes.

We made a deliberate decision not to include clinical aspects of cognition, such as cognitive disorders and cognitive behaviour therapy, because they each comprise a complete branch of psychology in themselves which is already well covered in specialist clinical texts. For the same reason, we have not included chapters on health psychology, educational psychology or organisational psychology, all of which have been covered elsewhere.

Being a new and developing area, applied cognitive psychology remains somewhat incomplete and fragmented, so inevitably the chapters of this book tend to deal with separate and in some cases fairly unrelated topics. One advantage of having fairly independent chapters is that you can read them in any order you like, so you can dip into any chapter that interests you without having to read the others first.

Table of contents:

2 PERCEPTION AND ATTENTION: ERRORS AND ACCIDENTS

3 FACE IDENTIFICATION

4 AUDITORY PERCEPTION

5 WORKING MEMORY AND PERFORMANCE LIMITATIONS

6 MEMORY IMPROVEMENT

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7 EVERYDAY MEMORY

8 WITNESS INTERVIEWS AND CRIME INVESTIGATION

9 DECISION MAKING

10 THE EFFECTS OF DRUGS ON COGNITION

11 BIOLOGICAL CYCLES AND COGNITION

12 EMOTION AND COGNITION

13 MUSIC AND COGNITION

14 SPORTING PERFORMANCE, PRESSURE AND COGNITION: INTRODUCING ATTENTIONAL CONTROL THEORY: SPORT