PhD in Experimental Psychology

The Graduate Program in Experimental Psychology offers the graduate course and develops research in several areas of Psychology. These areas cover:

• Behavior Analysis: It investigates conceptual and methodological problems in the experimental analysis of behavior, related to operant and respondent learning, with themes referring to verbal and cultural behavior, formation of equivalence classes, observation behavior, behavioral variability, learned helplessness, behavior social and culture, interaction of drugs and environmental contingencies, animal models of psychopathologies and creative behavior in animals and humans;
• Animal Behavior and Human Ethology: Under a comparative approach, it deals with the naturalistic study of behavior in terms of causation, ontogenesis, adaptive function and evolution. Motivational systems and the effects of individual experience are analyzed, as well as developmental characteristics regarding flexibility and predispositions in the ontogenesis of behavior. It constitutes a center for the development of the evolutionary perspective in Psychology, with implications for the understanding of basic processes and for application in education and health;
• Sensation, Perception and Cognition: Studies sensory, perceptual and cognitive processes, with emphasis on: visual system, sensory-perceptual development and its disorders, language development and its disorders, construction of knowledge, verbal interaction, experimental cognitive neuropsycholinguistics, drugs and behavior. Studies in this line of research traditionally make use of psychophysics and other behavioral measures, verbal reports, morphology, electrophysiology and molecular biology;
• Theoretical and Methodological Problems of Psychological Research: Study the construction of theories in psychology: historical and conceptual genesis of psychology: historical and methodological problems of research in psychology; experimental design and data analysis; historical-scientific analysis of the main theories of scientific psychology and propositions regarding the object and method of psychology; analysis and historical and conceptual genesis of psychology.

The Department of Experimental Psychology has laboratories that serve these areas, the Prototypes Workshop, the Quantitative Methods Sector and the Room for Observation and Recording of Human Behavior, which support the laboratories.