Examining the current state of the research in perception stressing contributions in visual information processing, this volume provides an original and timely account of recent results obtained in this and other related areas of cognitive psychology. The scope of the book is intended to be broad, featuring state-of-the-art contributions from a number of outstanding researchers from different parts of the world -- the United States, Europe, and Australia. The intention is to update areas of considerable theoretical implications and active experimental investigation in this broad field called the "psychology of perception." This volume's main purpose is to highlight, from a cognitive position, a selected number of important theoretical and empirical topics which deal with critical issues in perception and other high level, related cognitive processes such as attention, mental representation, memory, word naming and semantic categorization.
The studies reported were designed to answer many far-reaching questions including:
* Is the global precedence effect due to low or high level processing?
* Can veridical and illusory perception be explained by the same theory?
* What is the relationship between attention and perception?
* Is perception "direct" or an inferential process?
* What mechanisms are involved in picture and word naming and categorization?
* How can word and picture processing be modeled?
The answers to these questions seek to unite theoretical perspectives on very important areas of cognitive psychology such as attention, perception, representation of visual objects and words, and human memory.

The purpose of our research is to enhance the efficiency of AI problem solvers by automating representation changes. We have developed a system that improves the description of input problems and selects an appropriate search algorithm for each given problem. Motivation. Researchers have accumulated much evidence on the impor tance of appropriate representations for the efficiency of AI systems. The same problem may be easy or difficult, depending on the way we describe it and on the search algorithm we use. Previous work on the automatic im provement of problem descriptions has mostly been limited to the design of individual learning algorithms. The user has traditionally been responsible for the choice of algorithms appropriate for a given problem. We present a system that integrates multiple description-changing and problem-solving algorithms. The purpose of the reported work is to formalize the concept of representation and to confirm the following hypothesis: An effective representation-changing system can be built from three parts: * a library of problem-solving algorithms; * a library of algorithms that improve problem descriptions; * a control module that selects algorithms for each given problem.

This edition of the "Handbook" follows the first edition by 10 years. The earlier edition was a promissory note, presaging the directions in which the then-emerging field of social cognition was likely to move. The field was then in its infancy and the areas of research and theory that came to dominate the field during the next decade were only beginning to surface. The concepts and methods used had frequently been borrowed from cognitive psychology and had been applied to phenomena in a very limited number of areas. Nevertheless, social cognition promised to develop rapidly into an important area of psychological inquiry that would ultimately have an impact on not only several areas of psychology but other fields as well.
The promises made by the earlier edition have generally been fulfilled. Since its publication, social cognition has become one of the most active areas of research in the entire field of psychology; its influence has extended to health and clinical psychology, and personality, as well as to political science, organizational behavior, and marketing and consumer behavior. The impact of social cognition theory and research within a very short period of time is incontrovertible. The present volumes provide a comprehensive and detailed review of the theoretical and empirical work that has been performed during these years, and of its implications for information processing in a wide variety of domains.
The handbook is divided into two volumes. The first provides an overview of basic research and theory in social information processing, covering the automatic and controlled processing of information and its implications for how information is encoded and stored in memory, the mental representation of persons -- including oneself -- and events, the role of procedural knowledge in information processing, inference processes, and response processes. Special attention is given to the cognitive determinants and consequences of affect and emotion. The second book provides detailed discussions of the role of information processing in specific areas such as stereotyping; communication and persuasion; political judgment; close relationships; organizational, clinical and health psychology; and consumer behavior.
The contributors are theorists and researchers who have themselves carried out important studies in the areas to which their chapters pertain. In combination, the contents of this two-volume set provide a sophisticated and in-depth treatment of both theory and research in this major area of psychological inquiry and the directions in which it is likely to proceed in the future.

This edition of the "Handbook" follows the first edition by 10 years. The earlier edition was a promissory note, presaging the directions in which the then-emerging field of social cognition was likely to move. The field was then in its infancy and the areas of research and theory that came to dominate the field during the next decade were only beginning to surface. The concepts and methods used had frequently been borrowed from cognitive psychology and had been applied to phenomena in a very limited number of areas. Nevertheless, social cognition promised to develop rapidly into an important area of psychological inquiry that would ultimately have an impact on not only several areas of psychology but other fields as well.
The promises made by the earlier edition have generally been fulfilled. Since its publication, social cognition has become one of the most active areas of research in the entire field of psychology; its influence has extended to health and clinical psychology, and personality, as well as to political science, organizational behavior, and marketing and consumer behavior. The impact of social cognition theory and research within a very short period of time is incontrovertible. The present volumes provide a comprehensive and detailed review of the theoretical and empirical work that has been performed during these years, and of its implications for information processing in a wide variety of domains.
The handbook is divided into two volumes. The first provides an overview of basic research and theory in social information processing, covering the automatic and controlled processing of information and its implications for how information is encoded and stored in memory, the mental representation of persons -- including oneself -- and events, the role of procedural knowledge in information processing, inference processes, and response processes. Special attention is given to the cognitive determinants and consequences of affect and emotion. The second book provides detailed discussions of the role of information processing in specific areas such as stereotyping; communication and persuasion; political judgment; close relationships; organizational, clinical and health psychology; and consumer behavior.
The contributors are theorists and researchers who have themselves carried out important studies in the areas to which their chapters pertain. In combination, the contents of this two-volume set provide a sophisticated and in-depth treatment of both theory and research in this major area of psychological inquiry and the directions in which it is likely to proceed in the future.

Focusing on the application of human factors and ergonomics in the design of alarm systems, this book brings together all the disparate areas in a single volume.; The aim of the book is to present current human factor issues regarding alarm design in a variety of settings, such as industrial alarm systems in process industries, aviation, automobiles and intensive care. It argues that the severe shortcomings of alarm systems can be overcome through the use of human factors evaluation and design integration techniques. Contributors cover the areas of HCI, task analysis, training, personnel selection, and design and human behaviour in an emergency, which of course, can be influenced positively and negatively by the design and deployment of alarm systems.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203481712

"The book draws on a lot of research, is friendly to the reader, and will be of good value to teachers."

Paul Nation, Victoria University of Wellington, Australia

This comprehensive, up-to-date, and accessible text on idiom use, learning, and teaching approaches the topic with a balance of sound theory and extensive research in cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics combined with informed teaching practices. Idioms is organized in three parts:

• Part I includes discussion of idiom definition, classification, usage patterns, and functions.
• Part II investigates the process involved in the comprehension of idioms and the factors that influence individuals? understanding and use of idioms in both L1 and L2.
• Part III explores idiom acquisition and the teaching and learning of idioms, focusing especially on the strategies and techniques used to help students learn idioms.

To assist the reader in grasping the key issues, study questions are provided at the end of each chapter. The text also includes a glossary of special terms and an annotated list of selective idiom reference books and student textbooks.

Idioms is designed to serve either as a textbook for ESL/applied linguistics teacher education courses or as a reference book. No matter how the book is used, it will equip an ESL/applied linguistics students and professionals with a solid understanding of various issues related to idioms and the learning of them.

This book presents a new approach to understanding the family unit and how and why it functions as it does. The approach focuses on the cognitions of family members and how these, in turn, shape individuals' behavior and the functioning of the family system.
The use of the cognitive-behavioral perspective in family science has gained a quick and broad acceptance among social scientists and practitioners during the past decade. One reason for its success is that the basics of the approach are easy to learn and apply. Specifically, the approach maintains that a person who believes that he or she is a failure will -- because of this cognition -- act in certain self-defeating ways and have various self-deprecating feelings.
The wide acceptance of the cognitive-behavioral approach rests on more than its simplicity: the approach has repeatedly proven itself in the laboratory and in the clinic. The knowledge readers of this volume will gain about the cognitive-behavioral approach provides them with tools that they can use to better understand not only the family interactions, but the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals -- including themselves -- in the family setting.

The major aim of this book is to introduce the ways in which scientists approach and think about a phenomenon -- hearing -- that intersects three quite different disciplines: the physics of sound sources and the propagation of sound through air and other materials, the anatomy and physiology of the transformation of the physical sound into neural activity in the brain, and the psychology of the perception we call hearing. Physics, biology, and psychology each play a role in understanding how and what we hear.
The text evolved over the past decade in an attempt to convey something about scientific thinking, as evidenced in the domain of sounds and their perception, to students whose primary focus is not science. It does so using a minimum of mathematics (high school functions such as linear, logarithmic, sine, and power) without compromising scientific integrity. A significant enrichment is the availability of a compact disc (CD) containing over 20 examples of acoustic demonstrations referred to in the book. These demonstrations, which range from echo effects and filtered noise to categorical speech perception and total more than 45 minutes, are invaluable resources for making the text come alive.

The educational use of television, film, and related media has increased significantly in recent years, but our fundamental understanding of how media communicate information and which instructional purposes they best serve has grown very little. In this book, the author advances an empirically based theory relating media's most basic mode of presentation -- their symbol systems -- to common thought processes and to learning. Drawing on research in semiotics, cognition and cognitive development, psycholinguistics, and mass communication, the author offers a number of propositions concerning the particular kinds of mental processes required by, and the specific mental skills enhanced by, different symbol systems. He then describes a series of controlled experiments and field and cross-cultural studies designed to test these propositions. Based primarily on the symbol system elements of television and film, these studies illustrate under what circumstances and with what types of learners certain kinds of learning and mental skill development occur. These findings are incorporated into a general scheme of reciprocal interactions among symbol systems, learners' cognitions, and their mental activities; and the implications of these relationships for the design and use of instructional materials are explored.

Research in cognitive psychology has contributed much to our understanding of reading and spelling. Most of this work has concentrated on the processes used by literate adults to comprehend and produce written language, but there is a growing interest in applying cognitive theories to the development of literacy, and to the understanfing of disorders of reading and writing. Such disorders may be acquired as a consequence of a brain injury to a previously literate adult, or may be developmental, occurring in otherwise normal children.; This textbook attempts to present this work to a non-specialist audience. Though written primarily with students of psychology and education in mind, it is accessible also to parents and teachers.; The broad organization of the first edition is retained. The book opens with a consideration of the history and nature of writing, then moves on to deal with the nature of skilled reading. Other chapters deal with: the different ways that brain injury in adulthood can disrupt the mature reading skill the "acquired dyslexias"; spelling and writing processes, both in skilled writers and in patients with "acquired dysgraphia"; the way children develop the skills of reading and writing; and developmental reading and writing problems.

Much work has been done on cognitive processes and creativity, but there is another half to the picture of creativity -- the affect half. This book addresses that other half by synthesizing the information that exists about affect and creativity and presenting a new model of the role of affect in the creative process. Current information comes from disparate literatures, research traditions, and theoretical approaches. There is a need in the field for a comprehensive framework for understanding and investigating the role of affect in creativity. The model presented here spells out connections between specific affective and cognitive processes important in creativity, and personality traits associated with creativity.
Identifying common findings and themes in a variety of research studies and descriptions of the creative process, this book integrates child and adult research and the classic psychoanalytic approach to creativity with contemporary social and cognitive psychology. In so doing, it addresses two major questions:
* Is affect an important part of the creative process?
* If it is, then how is affect involved in creative thinking?
In addition, Russ presents her own research program in the area of affect and creativity, and introduces The Affect in Play Scale -- a method of measuring affective expression in children's play -- which can be useful in child psychotherapy and creativity research. Current issues in the creativity area are also discussed, such as artistic versus scientific creativity, adjustment and the creative process, the role of computers in learning about creativity, gender differences in the creative process, and enhancing creativity in home, school, and work settings. Finally, Russ points to future research issues and directions, and discusses alternative research paradigms such as mood-induction methods versus children's play procedures.

This volume is based on a conference held to examine what is known about cognitive behaviors and brain structure and function in three syndromes and to evaluate the usefulness of such models. The goal of this endeavor is to add to the knowledge base of cognitive neuroscience within a developmental framework. Most of what is known about the neurological basis of cognitive function in humans has been learned from studies of central nervous system trauma or disease in adults. Certain neurodevelopmental disorders affect the central nervous system in unique ways by producing specific as opposed to generalized cognitive deficit. Studies of these disorders using neurobiological and behavioral techniques can yield new insights into the localization of cognitive function and the developmental course of atypical cognitive profiles.
The focus of this book is a discussion of the multidisciplinary research findings from studies of autism, and Williams and Turner syndromes. The approaches, methods, techniques, and findings reported are at the cutting edge of neuroscience research on complex behavior patterns and their neural substrates. Each disorder is accompanied by some degree of general cognitive impairment or mental retardation. Of greater interest are the atypical deficits in which a cognitive function is spared, such as language in Williams syndrome, or is disproportionately depressed as are spatial discrimination skills and visual-motor coordination in Turner syndrome. Drastically reduced or seemingly absent language capabilities and little interaction with other people characterize the core autism syndrome. A comprehensive and critical discussion of appropriate statistical techniques is made vivid by examples given from studies of small groups or single subjects in neurolinguistics and related fields.

This book brings together psychometric, cognitive science, policy, and content domain perspectives on new approaches to educational assessment -- in particular, constructed response, performance testing, and portfolio assessment. These new assessment approaches -- a full range of alternatives to traditional multiple-choice tests -- are useful in all types of large-scale testing programs, including educational admissions, school accountability, and placement. This book's multi-disciplinary perspective identifies the potential advantages and pitfalls of these new assessment forms, as well as the critical research questions that must be addressed if these assessment methods are to benefit education.

In this volume, Berkowitz develops the argument that experiential and behavioral components of an emotional state are affected by many processes: some are highly cognitive in nature; others are automatic and involuntary. Cognitive and associative mechanisms theoretically come into play at different times in the emotion-cognition sequence. The model he proposes, therefore, integrates theoretical positions that previously have been artificially segregated in much of the emotion-cognition literature.
The breadth of the implications of Berkowitz's theory is also reflected in the diversity of this book's companion chapters. Written by researchers whose work focuses on both social cognition and emotion, these articles provide important insights and possible extensions of the "cognitive-neoassociationistic" conceptualization developed in the target article. Although each chapter is a valuable contribution in its own right, this volume, taken as a whole, is a timely and important contribution both to social cognition and to research and theory on emotion per se.

As in recent years, a thematic concept was selected over a general one for the 26th annual Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology. In this case the relation between memory and affect was targeted for two reasons. The first concerned the a priori theoretical relation between these content areas. The second concerned the observation that memory and affect have historically been studied as separate content areas--an unfortunate decision considering the potential of each area to inform the other. To redress this, investigators working on the "relation" between memory and affect were identified. Their presentations are also anchored by one or two presentations on either memory or affect. Those familiar with the broader domain of developmental psychology will readily identify this volume in the series as filling the void left by the lack of integration across domains of study.

This book examines two questions: Do people make use of abstract rules such as logical and statistical rules when making inferences in everyday life? Can such abstract rules be changed by training? Contrary to the spirit of reductionist theories from behaviorism to connectionism, there is ample evidence that people do make use of abstract rules of inference -- including rules of logic, statistics, causal deduction, and cost-benefit analysis. Such rules, moreover, are easily alterable by instruction as it occurs in classrooms and in brief laboratory training sessions. The fact that purely formal training can alter them and that those taught in one content domain can "escape" to a quite different domain for which they are also highly applicable shows that the rules are highly abstract. The major implication for cognitive science is that people are capable of operating with abstract rules even for concrete, mundane tasks; therefore, any realistic model of human inferential capacity must reflect this fact. The major implication for education is that people can be far more broadly influenced by training than is generally supposed. At high levels of formality and abstraction, relatively brief training can alter the nature of problem-solving for an infinite number of content domains.

This is a very unusual book. It brings to the English speaking reader a masterpiece written some 50 years ago by one of the greatest minds of the 20th century--Nicholai Aleksandrovich Bernstein--considered the founder of many contemporary fields of science such as biomechanics, motor control, and physiology of activity. Divided into two parts, this volume's first section is a translation of the Russian book On Dexterity and Its Development. It presents, in a very reader-friendly style, Bernstein's major ideas related to the development and control of voluntary movements in general, and to the notion of dexterity, in particular. Although very few scientific works remain interesting to the reader 50 years after they were written, this volume--now available for the first time in English--is a rare exception to this rule. His ideas are certainly not obsolete. Actually, we are just starting to grasp the depth and breadth of his thinking, especially his analysis of the complex notion of dexterity. The second section provides both a historical and a contemporary perspective on Bernstein's ideas. The original work was directed at a wide audience ranging from specialists in biomechanics and motor behavior, to coaches, neurologists, physical therapists, athletes, and even inquisitive college and high school students. The chapters contributed by contemporary scientists mirror Bernstein's style and present new findings in the areas of biomechanics, motor control, and motor development in a way that would be both understandable to non-specialists in these areas, and informative for professionals working in different areas related to human movement. All those interested in the origins and mechanisms of the production of voluntary movements, irrespective of their educational and professional background, will find this book valuable. In addition, the unique history and composition of this text will make it helpful and attractive to historians and philosophers of science.

The modern study of cognition finds itself with two widely endorsed but seemingly incongruous theoretical paradigms. The first of these, inspired by formal logic and the digital computer, sees reasoning in the principled manipulation of structured symbolic representations. The second, inspired by the physiology of the brain, sees reasoning as the behavior that emerges from the direct interactions found in large networks of simple processing components. Each paradigm has its own accomplishments, problems, methodology, proponents, and agenda.
This book records the thoughts of researchers -- from both computer science and philosophy -- on resolving the debate between the symbolic and connectionist paradigms. It addresses theoretical and methodological issues throughout, but at the same time exhibits the current attempts of practicing cognitive scientists to solve real problems.

This volume celebrates the 50th anniversary of the famous and influential work of Jean Piaget and Alina Szeminska, "The Child's Conception of Number." It is a tribute to those two authors as well as to the entire Geneva school that pioneered the genetic study of cognitive structures in children. Dealing with the process of the child's construction of the notion of number -- a very important subject for the child as well as for the teacher, the researcher, and the practicing psychologist -- it summarizes the progress that has been made and outlines new research directions in this area. The book is a compilation of the work of the foremost international researchers in this area and includes a wide spectrum of viewpoints and schools of thought. It also introduces several new authors from Europe, including students of Piaget, to the American academic community.

This book's two primary objectives are to present theory and research on the role of learners' achievement-related perceptions in educational contexts and to discuss the implications of this research for educational practices. Although contributors share the view that students' perceptions exert important effects in achievement settings, they differ in diverse ways including their theoretical orientation, their choice of research methodology, the perceptions they believe are of primary importance, and the antecedents and consequences of these perceptions. They discuss the current status of their ideas and provide a forward look at research and practice.

This text guides the reader through the many forms of shiftwork, adopting a broad definition as being any regularly-taken employment outside the "day working window" 06.00 to 18.00. The experiences of shiftworkers are described, along with those

Grounded in the user-centered design movement, this book offers a broad consideration of how our civilization has evolved its technical infrastructure for human purpose to help us make sense of the contemporary world of information infrastructure and online existence. The author incorporates historical, cultural and aesthetic approaches to situating information and its underlying technologies across time in the collective, lived experiences of humanity. In today's digital information world, user experience is vital to the success of any product or service. Yet as the user population expands to include us all, designing for people who vary in skills, abilities, preferences and backgrounds is challenging. This book provides an integrated understanding of users, and the methods that have evolved to identify usability challenges, that can facilitate cohesive and earlier solutions. The book treats information creation and use as a core human behavior based on acts of representation and recording that humans have always practiced. It suggests that the traditional ways of studying information use, with their origins in the distinct layers of social science theories and models is limiting our understanding of what it means to be an information user and hampers our efforts at being truly user-centric in design. Instead, the book offers a way of integrating the knowledge base to support a richer view of use and users in design education and evaluation. Understanding Users is aimed at those studying or practicing user-centered design and anyone interested in learning how people might be better integrated in the design of new technologies to augment human capabilities and experiences.

The design and functioning of an information system improve to the extent that the system can handle the questions people ask. Surprisingly, however, researchers in the cognitive, computer, and information sciences have not thoroughly examined the multitude of relationships between information systems and questions -- both question asking and answering. The purpose of this book is to explicitly examine these relationships. Chapter contributors believe that questions play a central role in the analysis, design, and use of different kinds of natural or artificial information systems such as human cognition, social interaction, communication networks, and intelligent tutoring systems. Their efforts show that data structures and representations need to be organized around the questioning mechanisms in order to achieve a quick retrieval of relevant useful information.

Arising out of consultations under the auspices of the Centre for the Study of the Christian Church, this book examines the Church of England's decision to ordain women to the priesthood and to make pastoral provision for those opposed. It attempts to discover and define the theological principles underlying both the ordination of women and the determination of the Church to maintain communion when these developments provoke fundamental disagreements.