Source: Laboratory of Jonathan Flombaum—Johns Hopkins University

As an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University, I teach Introduction to Cognitive Psychology. This large class primarily consists of freshman and sophomores majoring in related fields, like Psychology, Neuroscience, or Cognitive Science. One of the challenges I face in the classroom is teaching students to appreciate how data are obtained in the process of performing experiments. Students have difficulty in appreciating the chronology of experiments as they unfold in time.

This JoVE collection in Cognitive Psychology makes the experimental timeline absolutely clear and encourages students to understand the trajectory and not just jump to conclusions. The videos also present experiments as paradigms—to illustrate how researchers can implement tasks in different ways—depending on the questions at hand. Most of these questions translate to the real world and the limits of our cognition. For example, the video Measuring Verbal Working Memory Span demonstrates our limited memory capacity, which explains the difficulty in remembering long shopping lists.

These JoVE videos in Cognitive Psychology provide a perfect place for instructors to start if they are interested in demonstrating tasks in class. Better yet, the videos can be used to get students involved—to execute the procedures and to even be the participants. Thus, the collection perfectly introduces lab components to a Psychology class.