Perception, memory, attention and thought as information processing.
13 topics · 23 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Statistics of Mental Imagery
Francis Galton · 1880
A survey of how vividly people can picture a scene in the mind's eye finds the ability varies enormously between individuals, including scientists…
+5 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Perception: An Introduction to the Gestalt-Theorie
Kurt Koffka · 1922
Argues that perceived wholes are not built up from summed sensory elements, so perception must be explained by the organising laws of the whole…
+8 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology
Hermann Ebbinghaus · 1885
Using himself as subject and nonsense syllables to strip out prior meaning, shows that forgetting follows a steep, regular curve rather than a…
+7 more at this level
12 of 23 works
Francis Galton
A survey of how vividly people can picture a scene in the mind's eye finds the ability varies enormously between individuals, including scientists who reported almost none at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyAlan Baddeley
Replaces a single short-term store with a multi-component system - a central executive coordinating a phonological loop and a visuospatial sketchpad - each independently damageable and each with its own capacity limit.
Notes on this copyGeorge A. Miller
Traces cognitive psychology's break from behaviourism to a specific set of ideas imported from linguistics, computer science and information theory in the 1950s, not a gradual accumulation of anomalies.
Paul Bloom (YaleCourses)
Surveys psychology through the evidence that constrains each claim — development, language, memory, and social behaviour — and is explicit about which findings were later weakened.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Elizabeth Loftus (TED)
Argues from her own experiments that memory is reconstructed rather than recorded, so entirely false episodes can be implanted by suggestion and then recalled with full confidence.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Stephen M. Fleming
Surveys the neuroscience and psychology of metacognition to argue self-knowledge is a measurable, trainable skill rather than a fixed trait, and one that can fail independently of the ability it monitors.
Kurt Koffka
Argues that perceived wholes are not built up from summed sensory elements, so perception must be explained by the organising laws of the whole configuration itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyJ. Ridley Stroop
Naming the ink colour of a colour word is slower than naming a plain colour patch because reading is so automatic that it interferes with the deliberate task, establishing interference as a basic limit on attention.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyGeorge A. Miller
Immediate memory span is limited to about seven items regardless of how much information each one carries, because people expand capacity by recoding input into larger chunks rather than storing it raw.
Assumes no psychology; the experiments are described in enough detail to follow cold
17 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyPeter C. Wason
Given a rule to discover, people overwhelmingly test cases that confirm their first guess rather than ones that could refute it, revealing a systematic bias toward confirmation over falsification.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Roger N. Shepard & Jacqueline Metzler
The time to judge whether two drawings show the same rotated object rises linearly with the angle between them, showing that a mental image is manipulated as a continuous spatial representation rather than inspected like a static picture.
Notes on this copyElizabeth F. Loftus & John C. Palmer
The verb used to ask about a car crash - 'smashed' versus 'hit' - changes both the speed witnesses estimate and what they later claim to have seen, showing memory is reconstructed rather than replayed.
5 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyThis subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.