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Graduate Study

The Graduate Field of Psychology includes 39 faculty members from departments across the university including Psychology, Human Development, and Neurobiology and Behavior. Only Ph.D. candidates are admitted. The Field does not have an M.A. program. The goal of the Field is to educate students to become researchers, scholars, and teachers who will contribute to the future of psychology as a scientific discipline in academic or other research-oriented settings. The dominant strengths of the Field lie in three broadly defined areas: biopsychology, cognition and perception, and social/personality psychology. We do not offer training in clinical psychology, counseling, school psychology, community psychology, industrial psychology, or clinical neuropsychology. Applicants with primary interests in these subjects are not admitted.

Perception, Cognition and Development

Cornell professor Ulric Neisser introduced the term "Cognitive Psychology" in 1967, with a book that gave the name to the field and helped launch the cognitive revolution. According to Neisser, cognitive psychology is the study of how people learn, structure, store and use knowledge. This concise definition describes well the cognitive area of the graduate field of psychology at Cornell. Researchers working in this area study human perception, language and memory, as well as the development of various cognitive functions in infants. The methods they use are diverse, ranging from human behavioral experiments in development, perception and psycholinguistics, through computational modeling and simulation of vision and language processes, to human electrophysiology by means of event-related potential (ERP) analysis.

Behavioral and Evolutionary Neuroscience

The biopsychology group seeks to understand behavior and cognition through investigations of the integrated roles of evolution, development, and mechanisms. The emphasis is on naturalistic behaviors of animals and ecologically relevant behaviors of humans. Comparative prespectives are well represented, the full range of development, including aging, is investigated, and both social and non-social behaviors are explained. Core questions are, what are the mechanisms (brain, endrocrine, and behavioral) that enable animals (including humans) to behave appropriately? How do these mechanisms work? How do they develop? How did they evolve?

Social Psychology

Faculty members in the social/personality area are interested in understanding how people think, feel, and act in real-world social situations. There is a particular interest in how people make sense of the social world around them, as represented by research programs on judgment and decision making, attribution, self-knowledge, affect and emotion, and stereotyping/prejudice. Frequent topics of inquiry include whether people reach accurate or erroneous judgments about themselves and others, how people arrive at their decisions, and how those decisions can be influenced by emotions or factors outside of awareness.

How to apply to the Cornell Graduate Program in Psychology:

You must apply to the Cornell Graduate Program using this application. You may also want to investigate the Cornell Graduate School web site for additional information.

Contact Information

Director of Graduate Studies: David J. Field
Graduate Field Secretary: Pam A. Cunningham
211 Uris Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
Phone: 607-255-3834
Fax: 607-255-8433

 
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211 Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 USA
Phone: (607) 255-3834 Fax: (607) 255-8433