Cognitive Psychology
Jamie Longwell
Graduate Admissions Coordinator
402-472-3229
238 Burnett Hall
jlongwell1@unl.edu
Core Faculty
Area Adviser: Dr. John Flowers
The specialization in cognitive psychology is designed for students who have interests in perception, attention, memory, human learning, decision making, or other aspects of human information processing and cognition. The cognitive specialization is designed to be flexible and tailored to individual student interests and goals for career development. For example, students may choose a program that is aimed at an academic career emphasizing both research and teaching, or a program with a more applied emphasis in human factors or related areas. The relatively small size of the program and range of faculty interests permits establishment of close research collaboration with faculty.
While the cognitive specialization encourages applications from students with a broad range of research interests, current research interests of faculty and students include topics in both basic an applied cognition. These include visual and auditory attention, implicit learning, cross-modal and multimodal pattern recognition and memory, cognitive ergonomics of auditory and visual data displays, cognitive aspects of survey responses, autobiographical memory and eyewitness memory. For those students who have particular interests in quantitative data analysis and methodology issues, our program provides an excellent menu of courses within our department, including a strong emphasis on multivariate analysis methods. Additionally, many students choose to take quantitative methods courses from other departments including Sociology, Statistics, Survey Research and Methodology, Political Science and educational psychology to supplement their breadth in both quantitative and qualitative data analysis. Students who wish to pursue academic careers have numerous and diverse opportunities for gaining teaching experience in both content and methods courses. In addition, students who are interested in pursuing applied cognitive research or cognitive aspects of human factors are encouraged to take relevant courses or independent study in other departments (e.g., Industrial and Management Systems Engineering (human factors), Curriculum and Instruction, Speech Pathology and Audiology, Survey Research and Methodology).
Core Faculty for the cognitive specialization include Robert Belli, Brian Bornstein, John Flowers, Calvin Garbin, Lesa Hoffman and Michael Dodd. Other psychology faculty with interests in aspects of cognition include William Spaulding (from Clinical Psychology). Affiliated faculty from other departments include Ram Bishu (Industrial and Management Systems Engineering), Tom Carell (Speech Pathology & Audiology), and Ali Moeller (Curriculum & Instruction).
