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This is a new, somewhat “radical” introductory textbook for General Psychology and Neuroscience, based on a small set of core principles that cut across the full spectrum from neuroscience to social psychology. In short, this is an ambitious attempt to present a unified, principled perspective on the field, akin to what is standard in other fields.

The advantage to the student is that it is consistent, coherent, and concise (~250 pages), in contrast to standard textbooks which run over 800 pages and are filled with topical stories and historical accounts, that, while fascinating, ultimately distract from the understanding of the core concepts in the field.

Formats

Please use the following links to download the formatted version of the book (v1.1.1, updated Sep 26, 2021):

Lecture Videos

Recorded lectures for this course are available on this YouTube Playlist. Here a Course Syllabus.

The Three-C Principles

The core principles are the Three C’s

With just these three principles, we can understand a huge swath of psychology and neuroscience, and do so in a much more connected, coherent manner than the jumble of facts and stories typically presented in standard textbooks.

Author

Randall C. O’Reilly is Professor of Psychology and Computer Science in the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. Internationally recognized as a founder of the field of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience, Dr. O’Reilly develops large-scale systems-neuroscience computational models of learning, memory, and motivated cognitive control, to learn how neurons give rise to human cognitive function and to inform our understanding of brain-based disorders such as schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease.

GitHub Source

The source for this book is at: https://github.com/PsychNeuro/ed1