Cognitive Psychology with Placement Year

Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that investigates mental processes: how we perceive, attend to, remember, reason, use language, and make decisions. It treats the mind as a kind of information processing system, asking how input is encoded, transformed, stored, and retrieved, and what the architecture of cognition looks like. It is one of the most scientifically rigorous areas of psychology, drawing heavily on experimental methods, computational modelling, and increasingly on neuroscience, and it is relevant to an enormous range of practical applications from artificial intelligence to clinical neuropsychology and educational design.

At the University of East Anglia, this four-year full-time degree in cognitive psychology includes a placement year, giving you the opportunity to work in a professional or research context where psychological knowledge is applied, before returning to complete your final year of study. The placement can be in a research laboratory, a clinical setting, an educational institution, or a commercial environment where cognitive research is relevant. UEA has strong research expertise in cognitive psychology, and you will be taught by researchers who are actively contributing to the field.

You will study the core areas of cognitive psychology, including attention, memory, perception, language, reasoning, and decision-making, alongside the neuroscientific and computational frameworks that inform cognitive science more broadly.

Research methods and statistics are central to the degree. Psychology is built on empirical inquiry, and you will learn to design experiments, analyse data, interpret results, and communicate findings to both specialist and non-specialist audiences. These skills are among the most valued by employers across many sectors beyond psychology itself.

Graduates in cognitive psychology go on to careers in research, where cognitive psychologists contribute to both academic and commercial understanding of human performance and behaviour. User experience and usability research in technology companies, clinical neuropsychology following postgraduate training, educational psychology, artificial intelligence, and human factors engineering are all areas where cognitive expertise is specifically valued. Postgraduate study in cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, clinical psychology, or artificial intelligence is a natural continuation.