SONA
Students in our Introductory Psychology courses (PSYA01 and PSYA02) learn about research that provides much of our understanding of mental processes. Opportunities to participate in experiments augment this knowledge and allow students to become actively involved in the learning.
SONA was created to allow researchers who conduct experiments with human participants to recruit students from the two introductory courses. Upon logging into SONA, students can see which projects are in need of participants and can obtain some information about the projects. Students who are interested in participating in a study can sign up for an available session. The system then removes this session from the pool of available times and keeps track of appointments.
SONA provides a number of other features that are helpful to researchers and participants. They include the management of credits, an online "statement" earned credits, automated reminder e-mails to participants, and printable "day" forms that allow a researcher to print out lists of appointments for any given day.
Research Areas
Research and scholarship are central activities in the Department of Psychology. The interests of the faculty fall into five overlapping core areas:
Cognitive Neuroscience
The study of human cognition and perception involves investigating the mental processes that allow one to successfully interact with the world, and includes the study of the basic input systems that receive information, the motor systems that afford interaction with the world, the internal representation systems that enable learning, memory, and belief systems, and the control systems that regulate how these processes interact with each other...
Clinical
Clinical Psychology at UTSC has primary research strengths in the areas of clinical neuropsychology and neurosciences, personality and psychological assessment, and minfulness- and acceptance-based psychotherapies.
Social Psychology
If psychology is the scientific study of mental processes, social psychology details how socio-cultural and individual-difference factors contribute to these mental processes.
Behavioural Neuroscience
Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system. It joins psychology and biology, and many other disciplines encompassing cellular and molecular, behavioural, cognitive, developmental and social neuroscience as well as clinical neuropsychology.
Developmental Psychology
The overarching goal of this group is to explore from multiple perspectives, populations, and methods, how experience contributes to learning, subsequent behavior, and human growth from infancy through childhood to adulthood.