Welcome!

Welcome to the Stanford Summer Cognitive Psychology blog! I am really excited and looking forward to our class this summer. For me, this class will be a great opportunity to remember all the parts of cognitive psychology that made me want to become a researcher. I hope you will find cognitive psychology as inspiring as I do.

This blog is a space for all of us to discuss ideas, questions, comments that come up in the course. They can be based on our textbook, lectures, journal articles, discussions, or just your observations in the real world. Please also feel free to share links or other online resources. For example, the New York Times recently published this article about IQ and whether family dynamics and birth order affect your IQ. The article even quotes Stanford psychologist, Robert Zajonc. I have one brother much younger than me, and I think we had very different roles in the family. Could this have affected our IQs? What about other parts of our cognition? How useful is it to think of our intelligence in terms of an IQ anyway? I would like to take a closer look at the study to see how they conducted the experiment and whether they consider some of these questions. We will be discussing human intelligence at the end of the summer, so these questions will definitely come up again.