• Guide to undergraduate study: Psychology
• Courses offered by the Department of Experimental Psychology
• Recognition by the British Psychological Society
• Undergraduate admissions
• Course material

Undergraduate Teaching Information

Courses offered by the Department of Experimental Psychology

The Department’s two central courses are NST Part Ib and Part II Experimental Psychology. However, the Department runs or contributes to the following courses:

First year (Part IA)

NST Part IA Evolution and Behaviour (interdepartmental course). Comparative cognition, comparative psychology, and evolutionary psychology are introduced as part of this course. See http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/.

NST Part IA Elementary Mathematics for Biologists (interdepartmental course). The Department contributes teaching on statistics to this course. See http://www.cam.ac.uk/cambuniv/natscitripos/ps/aims/p1a/emaths.html.

Second year (Part IB)

NST Part IB Experimental Psychology. This course focuses on human psychology, beginning with topics in perception not far removed from biology and physics and moving on to the mental processes involved in attention, learning and memory, language, action, awareness, thinking and reasoning, cognitive and social development, and abnormal mental states. For full details, see the course booklet and timetable - http://teaching.psychol.cam.ac.uk.

NST Part IB Neurobiology (interdepartmental course). This multidisciplinary course in neurobiology includes material contributed by the Department on the neurobiology of motivation and emotion, learning and memory, and ‘higher’ functions of the nervous system including language. For full details, see http://www.pdn.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1b-neurobiology.shtml.

MVST Part IB Neurobiology and Human Behaviour (interdepartmental course). Psychology is fundamental to medicine; psychiatric disease is a major burden on individuals and on society, mental states influence physical disease processes, and psychology relates to the day-to-day job of a medical or surgical practitioner. The Department teaches psychological and neurobiological aspects of mental illness within the Neurobiology and Human Behaviour course taken by all medical students; the course also includes material on the neurobiology of learning, memory, and cognition. (Vets take a comparable course in Neurobiology and Animal Behaviour, to which the Department does not contribute.) See links from http://www.bio.cam.ac.uk/teaching/nstneurobiology/.

MVST Part IB Experimental Psychology Option. Medical students choose from a range of Special Option courses to complete Part I. The Experimental Psychology option is popular and emphasizes human psychology; it deals with attention, learning, memory, cognitive development, reasoning, intelligence, and psychopathology. (This option is not recommended for vets, who will have studied Neurobiology and Animal Behaviour rather than Neurobiology and Human Behaviour as part of their ‘core’ Ib course.) See course outline from teaching.psychol.cam.ac.uk/mvst1bop.html.

Third year (Part II)

Biological and Biomedical Sciences Part II: Psychology. No experimental project is required for this option and so it will recommend itself to those who do not plan a career in experimental science. Candidates attend the same lectures and sit the same written papers as those reading NST Part II Psychology (see NST Part II Psychology booklet), but in addition they read a minor subject and write a dissertation of up to 6000 words. The topic of the dissertation may be drawn either from the field of psychology or from the field of the chosen minor subject. Note: this course does not qualify candidates for entry to postgraduate training in clinical psychology. See course outline from http://www.bio.cam.ac.uk/sbs/facbiol/bbs

Part II Joint Course in Physiology and Psychology. This is typically taken by only a few students each year. It combines the neurobiology option of Part II Physiology with topics available in Part II Psychology. For details, see the http://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/pages/teaching/materials.html.

Part II Neuroscience (interdepartmental course). Part II Neuroscience is a course offered by the departments Experimental Psychology, Pharmacology, Physiology, Physiology, Development and Neuroscience (PDN) and Zoology; it takes a broad approach to the modern field of neuroscience, treating it at a range of levels from the molecular to the cognitive. For full details, see www.bio.cam.ac.uk/teaching/neuroscience.