Randolph-Macon College Psychology Professor Cedar Riener is the co-author of Cognition: The Thinking Animal (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Co-written with Daniel T. Willingham, the book takes complex experiments in cognitive psychology and describes them for beginning college students.

“In the book we examine how we can discover the answers to key questions about the mind (Can we focus attention on more than one thing? Is language unique to humans?) by describing experiments that control, manipulate and measure mental processes,” explains Riener. “We wrote the book using down-to-earth narrative prose that avoids jargon, addresses the reader directly and incorporates humor.”

Riener says that he and Willingham collaborated on this fourth edition of the book in order to show how experiments in cognitive psychology connect to the basic questions about how the mind works.

“We want to engage curiosity about how the mind works with the difficulties of studying mental processes in controlled laboratory situations,” says Riener. “We also want to introduce students to the science of cognition by building a coherent story of how specific experiments answered key questions about the mind.”

Cedar Riener
Riener, who earned his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from University of Virginia, joined the RMC faculty in 2009. He has taught a variety of courses at RMC, including Sensation and Perception, Cognitive Psychology, and Research and Theoretical Systems in Sensation and Perception. One of his most popular courses at RMC is The Psychology of Illusions, which explores several domains of psychology through the lens of illusion.

In 2015, Riener was quoted in a BuzzFeed article about an Internet sensation regarding the color of a dress.