ABSTRACT

WE L L , H E R E YO U A R E : sitting down, reading a book. Notreally very remarkable, you might think-initially. What’s more, the book is about cognitive psychology, a topic you might be expecting to find dull and hardly relevant to what people usually expect psychology to be about. Are attention, perception and memory really that important? If so, are they really as interesting as other aspects of psychology such as social interaction or developmental psychology? Let us consider this by asking some questions. How did you get hold of this book? Why did you decide to read it? Perhaps someone told you about it. How do you remember who told you? Would you recognise that person if you saw them again? How did you understand what they said to you? If you had to go to the library, how did you know what to do there, or how use the catalogue? How did you know what a bookcase looked like and how did you avoid walking into desks and other people on your route? How did you read the words on the spine of the book to see if they matched the title you remembered, and how did you manage to reach for the book you wanted rather than another book nearby? The answers to these few questions involve attention, perception and memory. Now, while you are reading, you are moving your eyes along the lines of texteffortlessly. You are paying attention to reading; you perceive the words and know what they mean because you have learnt them and they are stored in your memory. As you read on you may learn new things that will also become stored in memory, but how will you be able to recall what you have learned when it comes to the exam? Whether or not you do well in a test, I hope you will have gained some insight into the importance of attention, perception and memory for daily living.