UAlbany's Cognitive Psychology PhD Program
Pierce Johnson is a second-year doctoral student in UAlbany’s Cognitive Psychology program. Read on to learn about this field and the career outcomes available to graduates with this degree.
What is Cognitive Psychology?
Cognitive psychology can be a bit difficult to define. We don’t work with rats like neuroscientists might, we don’t attempt to treat patients like a clinician would, and we don’t specifically focus on how attitudes or personality influence others like a social psychologist does. Instead, we care about “invisible” processes, such as:
- Memory
- Attention
- Perception
- Language
- Problem-solving
- Decision-making
- Reasoning
- Creativity
Because what we study is often impossible to observe directly—you can’t exactly see a memory—we must come up with clever ways of indirectly measuring the things we care about. Take for example someone’s memory after studying a list of words. We might measure how long someone takes to remember a word, how many words they remember, or even if they remember related but incorrect words. All these tell us something interesting about the memory a person has for the words they studied.
We then ask, “If these were the words someone remembered, what must be going on in someone’s brain while they study and recall these words?” and we try to generalize to whole groups to explain why one group might remember certain words while another group does not. Sometimes we might even attempt to make mathematical models that predict how different groups will perform when remembering words.
What can you do with a PhD in Cognitive Psychology?
The great thing about cognitive psychology being so broad is there are many different directions you can go once you have your degree. Some of my friends want to stay in higher education and continue teaching or doing research. Plenty more want to leave and conduct research in industry or the military. For example, one of our recent grads worked as a user experience researcher at companies like Google, Cash App, and Afterpay after graduating from UAlbany’s program.
Because a PhD is a research degree, we learn how to design and run studies with human participants, which requires a lot of organization and attention to detail. We often must learn how to code our studies so they can be presented on computers or make use of tools such as eye-trackers and EEG. We learn to analyze our data with statistical tools, critically think, and write the results of our work so that can be presented at conferences and in published research articles. All these skills become useful in finding jobs once we have our degree.
Why did you choose Cognitive Psychology at UAlbany?
To be honest, UAlbany wasn’t on my radar until a month before I applied! I learned about UAlbany’s program when I attended a conference shortly before I submitted my other applications. At that conference, I ran into a current UAlbany student who had similar research interests in memory and preference for music, and his advisor was recruiting new students. After pulling aside his advisor—now my advisor—I decided to apply to work in his lab. The rest is history! My application was accepted, and I now work with Dr. Greg Cox studying how people remember and make predictions about what they hear; that student, Nate, is now my lab-mate and close friend.
The people I get to collaborate with are 100% the reason I chose UAlbany. I have an incredibly supportive advisor in Greg, and a group of knowledgeable and supportive colleagues who are more than happy to help me if I have questions, and we often hangout once the workday is done.