Why do we sometimes fail to notice what is right in front of us, remember events that never happened, or feel attracted to someone without an apparent reason? This course explores the quirks, biases, and hidden processes of the human mind as they happen in everyday life. We will look at how perception, attention, memory, language, and decision-making are shaped and often distorted by culture and environment, through examples such as optical illusions, false memories, the psychology of attraction, the cognitive toll of stress and poverty, and the biases that guide our choices.

Learning Outcomes and Assessment Measures 
Below are the course’s learning outcomes, followed by the methods that will be used to assess students’ achievement for each learning outcome. By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify common cognitive biases and mental experiences in perception, attention, memory, language, and decision-making (Weekly Online Quiz);
• Summarize connections between classic psychological experiments and everyday experiences (Weekly Online Quiz, Final Essay);
• Analyze and Distinguish personal, social, cultural, and contextual factors that affect cognition (Final Essay);
• Integrate psychological concepts and empirical findings into a coherent argument about the limits of human cognition (Final Essay).