Decision making or making judgments is an essential function in the ordinary life of any individual. Decisions can often be made easily, but sometimes, it can be difficult due to conflict, uncertainty, or ambiguity of the variables required to make the decision. As human beings, we constantly have to decide between different activities such as occupational, recreational, political, economic, etc. These decisions can be transcendental or inconsequential. Analyzing the Role of Cognitive Biases in the Decision-Making Process presents comprehensive research focusing on cognitive shortcuts in the decision-making process. While highlighting topics including jumping to conclusion bias, personality traits, and theoretical models, this book is ideally designed for mental health professionals, psychologists, sociologists, managers, academicians, researchers, and upper-level students seeking current research on cognitive biases that affect individual decision making in daily life.

Stress: Concepts, Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior: Handbook in Stress Series, Volume 1, examines stress and its management in the workplace and is targeted at scientific and clinical researchers in biomedicine, psychology, and some aspects of the social sciences. The audience is appropriate faculty and graduate and undergraduate students interested in stress and its consequences. The format allows access to specific self-contained stress subsections without the need to purchase the whole nine volume Stress handbook series. This makes the publication much more affordable than the previously published four volume Encyclopedia of Stress (Elsevier 2007) in which stress subsections were arranged alphabetically and therefore required purchase of the whole work. This feature will be of special significance for individual scientists and clinicians, as well as laboratories. In this first volume of the series, the primary focus will be on general stress concepts as well as the areas of cognition, emotion, and behavior.

Recent years have seen a rise in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the mind. However, relatively little emphasis has been placed on attention, its functions, and phenomenology. As a result, there are a multitude of definitions and explanatory frameworks that describe what attention is, what it does, and how it works. This volume proposes that one way to discuss attention is by utilizing an integrative multidisciplinary framework that takes into consideration aspects of attention as a means of accessing the world and as a mediator of experience. It brings together contributions from cognitive science, philosophy, and psychology in order to shed light on these aspects of attention. By including both theoretical and empirical approaches to attention, this volume will provide (1) an innovative framework for examining attention as something that mediates experience and (2) new perspectives on foundational and defi nitional issues of what attention is and how it contributes to our ability to access the world. By drawing together different disciplines, this volume broadens the concept of attention. It opens up a new way of looking at attention as an active process through which the world is disclosed for us.

If the three r's define education's past, there are five i's-information, images, interaction, inquiry, and innovation-that forecast its future, one in which students think for themselves, actively self-assess, and enthusiastically use technology to further their learning and contribute to the world. What students need, but too often do not get, is deliberate instruction in the critical and creative thinking skills that make this vision possible. The i5 approach provides a way to develop these skills in the context of content-focused and technology-powered lessons that give students the opportunity to: Seek and acquire new information. Use visual images and nonlinguistic representations to add meaning. Interact with others to obtain and provide feedback and enhance understanding. Engage in inquiry-use and develop a thinking skill that will expand and extend knowledge. Generate innovative insights and products related to the lesson goals. Jane E. Pollock and Susan Hensley explain the i5 approach's foundations in brain research and its links to proven instructional principles and planning models. They provide step-by-step procedures for teaching 12 key thinking skills and share lesson examples from teachers who have successfully "i5'ed" their instruction. With practical guidance on how to revamp existing lessons, The i5 Approach is an indispensable resource for any teacher who wants to help students gain deeper and broader content understanding and become stronger and more innovative thinkers.

Psychology of Learning and Motivation publishes empirical and theoretical contributions in cognitive and experimental psychology, ranging from classical and instrumental conditioning to complex learning and problem solving. Each chapter thoughtfully integrates the writings of leading contributors, who present and discuss significant bodies of research relevant to their discipline. Volume 64 includes chapters on such varied topics as causal reasoning, the role of affordances in memory, technology-based support for older adult communication in safety-critical domains and what edge-based masking effects can tell us about cognition.

This book integrates findings from across domains in performance psychology to focus on core research on what influences peak and non-peak performance. The book explores basic and applied research identifying cognition-action interactions, perception-cognition interactions, emotion-cognition interactions, and perception-action interactions. The book explores performance in sports, music, and the arts both for individuals and teams/groups, looking at the influence of cognition, perception, personality, motivation and drive, attention, stress, coaching, and age. This comprehensive work includes contributions from the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia.

What is given to us in conscious experience? The Given is an attempt to answer this question and in this way contribute to a general theory of mental content. The content of conscious experience is understood to be absolutely everything that is given to one, experientially, in the having of an experience. Michelle Montague focuses on the analysis of conscious perception, conscious emotion, and conscious thought, and deploys three fundamental notions in addition to the fundamental notion of content: the notions of intentionality, phenomenology, and consciousness. She argues that all experience essentially involves all four things, and that the key to an adequate general theory of what is given in experience-of 'the given'-lies in giving a correct specification of the nature of these four things and the relations between them. Montague argues that conscious perception, conscious thought, and conscious emotion each have a distinctive, irreducible kind of phenomenology-what she calls 'sensory phenomenology', 'cognitive phenomenology', and 'evaluative phenomenology' respectively-and that these kinds of phenomenology are essential in accounting for the intentionality of these mental phenomena.

Advances in Motivation Science, Elsevier's new serial, focuses on the ways motivation has traditionally been one of the mainstays of the science of psychology, not only playing a major role in the early dynamic and Gestalt models of the mind, but also playing an integral and fundamental part of the behaviorist theories of learning and action. The cognitive revolution in the 1960 and 70's eclipsed the emphasis on motivation to a large extent, but it has returned in full force prompting this new serial on a "hot topic" of the contemporary scene that is, once again, firmly entrenched as a foundational issue in scientific psychology. This volume brings together internationally recognized experts who focus on cutting-edge theoretical and empirical contributions relating to this important area of psychology.

Psychology of Learning and Motivation publishes empirical and theoretical contributions in cognitive and experimental psychology, ranging from classical and instrumental conditioning to complex learning and problem solving. Each chapter thoughtfully integrates the writings of leading contributors, who present and discuss significant bodies of research relevant to their discipline. Volume 63 includes chapters on such varied topics as memory and imagery, statistical regularities, eyewitness lineups, embodied attention, the teleological choice rule, inductive reasoning, causal reasoning and cognitive and neural components of insight.

The Cognitive Science of Religion introduces students to key empirical studies conducted over the past 25 years in this new and rapidly expanding field. In these studies, cognitive scientists of religion have applied the theories, findings and research tools of the cognitive sciences to understanding religious thought, behaviour and social dynamics. Each chapter is written by a leading international scholar, and summarizes in non-technical language the original empirical study conducted by the scholar. No prior or statistical knowledge is presumed, and studies included range from the classic to the more recent and innovative cases. Students will learn about the theories that cognitive scientists have employed to explain recurrent features of religiosity across cultures and historical eras, how scholars have tested those theories, and what the results of those tests have revealed and suggest. Written to be accessible to undergraduates, this provides a much-needed survey of empirical studies in the cognitive science of religion.

Neuroscience has made considerable progress in figuring out how the brain works. We know much about the molecular-genetic and biochemical underpinnings of sensory and motor functions, and recent neuroimaging work has opened the door to investigating the neural underpinnings of higher-order cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, and even free will. In these types of investigations, researchers apply specific stimuli to induce neural activity in the brain and look for the function in question. However, there may be more to the brain and its neuronal states than the changes in activity we induce by applying particular external stimuli.
In Volume 1 of Unlocking the Brain, Georg Northoff presents his argument for how the brain must code the relationship between its resting state activity and stimulus-induced activity in order to enable and predispose mental states and consciousness. By presupposing such a basic sense of neural code, the author ventures into different territories and fields of current neuroscience, including a comprehensive exploration of the features of resting state activity as distinguishable from and stimulus-induced activity; sparse coding and predictive coding; and spatial and temporal features of the resting state itself. This yields a unique and novel picture of the brain, and will have a major and lasting impact on neuroscientists working in neuroscience, psychiatry, and related fields.

Neuroscience has made considerable progress in figuring out how the brain works. We know much about the molecular-genetic and biochemical underpinnings of sensory and motor functions. Recent neuroimaging work has opened the door to investigating the neural underpinnings of higher-order cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, and even free will. In these types of investigations, researchers apply specific stimuli to induce neural activity in the brain and look for the function in question. However, there may be more to the brain and its neuronal states than the changes in activity we induce by applying particular external stimuli. In Volume 2 of Unlocking the Brain, Georg Northoff addresses consciousness by hypothesizing about the relationship between particular neuronal mechanisms and the various phenomenal features of consciousness. Northoff puts consciousness in the context of the resting state of the brain thereby delivering a new point of view to the debate that permits very interesting insights into the nature of consciousness. Moreover, he describes and discusses detailed findings from different branches of neuroscience including single cell data, animal data, human imaging data, and psychiatric findings. This yields a unique and novel picture of the brain, and will have a major and lasting impact on neuroscientists working in neuroscience, psychiatry, and related fields.