In short there will be a variety of ways in which the subject material will be presented to you. Please come to class. Your active presence and participation in the class is required not optional. Note the points for class participation. Absences, excused or not, will significantly lower your grade.
Cognitive psychology is the study of human thinking and memory processes.
In many ways, it is the oldest part of psychology, going all the way back to Aristotle and Plato. You will discover, however, that cognitive psychology is somewhat different from other areas of psychology that you may have studied. The level of description that cognitive psychology is concerned with is quite different than what you may be used to. The cognitive level tries to understand the mind at an abstract functional level, which is not the same as the neural level and is not the same level of description as our everyday ideas about mental processing, although often the ideas will have a correspondence to things we have intuited. For example, we all have a subjective sense of internal mental imagery that we experience in our minds.