McMaster University will continue to host undergraduate academic activities remotely for the Spring/Summer/Intersession term with only a few exceptions for courses that need student access to specialized equipment.
Our cognitive psychologists study how people perceive and operate in the world around them. We explore the way individuals mentally represent their experience and then use these representations to function, bringing their past knowledge and their biases to bear on how they perceive and understand all current events. Perceiving, imagining, thinking, remembering, forming concepts and solving problems – indeed all aspects of people's mental lives – define the domain of cognitive exploration.
Perception as a field of research is one of the oldest and most fundamental disciplines within psychology. We striv to understand how stimuli from the world interact with our sensory systems, forming visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory representations of the world. Research in perception and psychophysics looks to discover the lawful relations between environmental events and subjective experience. The modern study of perception is highly integrative, combining cognitive, behavioural, computational, developmental and neuroscientific approaches.