SHORTLISTED FOR THE PHYSICS WORLD BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019 'One of the deepest and most original thinkers of his generation of cognitive scientists. His startling argument has implications for philosophy, science, and how we understand the world around us' Steven Pinker 'Is reality virtual? It's a question made even more interesting by this book' Barbara Kiser, Nature Do we see the world as it truly is? In The Case Against Reality, pioneering cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says no? we see what we need in order to survive. Our visual perceptions are not a window onto reality, Hoffman shows us, but instead are interfaces constructed by natural selection. The objects we see around us are not unlike the file icons on our computer desktops: while shaped like a small folder on our screens, the files themselves are made of a series of ones and zeros - too complex for most of us to understand. In a similar way, Hoffman argues, evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us. Yet now these illusions can be manipulated by advertising and design. Drawing on thirty years of Hoffman's own influential research, as well as evolutionary biology, game theory, neuroscience, and philosophy, The Case Against Reality makes the mind-bending yet utterly convincing case that the world is nothing like what we see through our eyes.

Parenting and Theory of Mind represents the conjunction of two major research literatures in child psychology. One is longstanding. The question of how best to rear children has been a central topic for psychology ever since psychology began to develop as a science. The other research literature is a good deal younger, though quickly expanding. Theory of mind (ToM) has to do with understanding of the mental world-what people (children in particular) know or think about mental phenomena such as beliefs, desires, and emotions. An important question that research on TOM addresses is where do children's ToM abilities come from? In particular, how do children's experiences shape their development? If we know the formative experiences that underlie ToM, then we may be able to optimize this important aspect of development for all children. The last 15 or so years have seen a rapid expansion of the literature on the social contributors to ToM, including hundreds of studies directed to various aspects of parenting. These studies have made clear that parents can be important contributors to what their children understand about the mental world. This is the first book to comprehensively bring together the literature on ToM and parenting, summarizing what we know about how parenting contributes to one of the most important outcomes in cognitive development and outlining future directions for research in this growing area.

This book presents a critical reimagining of education and educational research in addressing practices of representation and their relation to epistemology, subjectivity and ontology in the context of early childhood education. Drawing on posthumanist perspectives and the immanent materialism of Deleuze & Guattari to conceive of early childhood education, childhood and indeed, adult life, in new ways, it highlights the powerful role of language in subjectivity and ontology, and introduces affectensity as a concept which can be put to work to undo habitual relations and meanings. It proposes that ethical becomings require the engagement of an expansion and intensification of a body's affect or capacity, and offers readers a provocation for enhancing creative capacity as an ethic. This book is an important contribution to the discussions on methods for living and of ways of thinking commensurate with the orientation of a posthuman turn.

This book presents strategies and practices for facilitating effective learning for mainland Chinese students in western based education - regarding e.g. the choice of instructional techniques, attention to students' cultural dislocation aspects, comfort, familiarity, and ease of knowledge transfer. It embeds innovativeness at a conceptual level, and argues for a holistic and "engaged" approach to learning effectiveness for mainland Chinese students.

It's a Jungle in There pursues the hypothesis that the overarching theory of biology, Darwin's theory, should be the overarching theory of cognitive psychology. Taking this approach, David Rosenbaum, a cognitive psychologist and former editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, proposes that the phenomena of cognitive psychology can be understood as emergent interactions among dumb neural elements all competing and cooperating in a kind of inner jungle. Rosenbaum suggests that this perspective allows for the presentation of cognitive psychology in a new way, both for students (for whom the book is mainly intended) and for seasoned investigators (who may be looking for a fresh way to approach and understand their material). Rather than offering cognitive psychology as a rag-tag collection of miscellaneous facts, as has generally been the case in cognitive-psychology textbooks, this volume presents cognitive psychology under a single rubric: "It's a jungle in there." Written in a light-hearted way with continual reference to hypothetical neural creatures eking out their livings in a tough environment, this text is meant to provide an over-arching principle that can motivate more in-depth study of the mind and brain.

The way we make sense of emotional situations has long been considered a foundation for the construction of our emotional experiences. Sometimes emotional meanings become distorted and so do our emotional experiences become disturbed. In the last decades, an embodied construction of emotional meanings has emerged. In this book, the embodied simulation framework is introduced for distorted emotional and motivational appraisals such as irrational beliefs, focusing on hyper-reactive emotional and motivational neural embodied simulations as core processes of cognitive vulnerability to emotional disorders. By embodying distorted emotional cognition we can extend the traditional views of the development of distorted emotional appraisals beyond learning from stress-sensitization process. Conclusions for the conceptualization of distorted emotional appraisals and treatment implications are discussed. Distorted emotional cognitions such as rigid thinking (I should succeed), awfulizing (It's awful) and low frustration tolerance (I can't stand it) are both vulnerabilities to emotional disorders and targets of psychotherapy. In this book, I argue that distorted emotional cognitions which act as proximal vulnerability to emotional disorders are embodied in hyper-reactive neural states involved in dysregulated emotions. Traditionally, excessive negative knowledge has been considered the basis of the cognitive vulnerability to emotional disorders. I suggest that the differences in the affective embodiments of distorted cognition confer its vulnerability status, rather than the differences in dysfunctional knowledge. I propose that negative knowledge and stress-induced brain changes conflate each other in building cognitive vulnerability to disturbed emotion. This model of distorted emotional cognition suggests new integration of learning and medication interventions in psychotherapy. This book is an important contribution to the literature given that a new model for the conceptualization of cognitive vulnerability is presented which extends the way we integrate biological, behavioral, and memory interventions in cognitive restructuring. This work is part of a larger project on embodied clinical cognition.

This book provides a corpus-led analysis of multi-word units (MWUs) in English, specifically fixed pairs of nouns which are linked by a conjunction, such as 'mum and dad', 'bride and groom' and 'law and order'. Crucially, the occurrence pattern of such pairs is dependent on genre, and this book aims to document the structural distribution of some key Linked Noun Groups (LNGs). The author looks at the usage patterns found in a range of poetry and fiction dating from the 17th to 20th century, and also highlights the important role such binomials play in academic English, while acknowledging that they are far less common in casual spoken English. His findings will be highly relevant to students and scholars working in language teaching, stylistics, and language technology (including AI).

Decision making cuts across most areas of intellectual enquiry and academic endeavor. The classical view of individual human thinkers choosing among options remains important and instructive, but the contributors to this volume broaden this perspective to characterize the decision making behavior of groups, non-human organisms and even non-living objects and mathematical constructs. A diverse array of methods is brought to bear-mathematical, computational, subjective, neurobiological, evolutionary, and cultural. We can often identify best or optimal decisions and decision making processes, but observed responses may deviate markedly from these, to a large extent because the environment in which decisions must be made is constantly changing. Moreover, decision making can be highly constrained by institutions, natural and social context, and capabilities. Studies of the mechanisms underlying decisions by humans and other organisms are just beginning to gain traction and shape our thinking. Though decision making has fundamental similarities across the diverse array of entities considered to be making them, there are large differences of degree (if not kind) that relate to the question of human uniqueness. From this survey of views and approaches, we converge on a tentative agenda for accelerating development of a new field that includes advancing the dialog between the sciences and the humanities, developing a defensible classification scheme for decision making and decision makers, addressing the role of morality and justice, and moving advances into applications-the rapidly developing field of decision support.

The question of how well children recall and can discuss emotional experiences is one with numerous theoretical and applied implications. Theoretically, the role of emotions generally and emotional distress specifically in children's emerging cognitive abilities has implications for understanding how children attend to and process information, how children react to emotional information, and how that information affects their development and functioning over time. Practically speaking, increasing numbers of children have been involved in legal settings as victims or witnesses to violence, highlighting the need to determine the extent to which children's eyewitness reports of traumatic experiences are accurate and complete. In clinical contexts, the ability to narrate emotional events is emerging as a significant predictor of psychological outcomes. How children learn to describe emotional experiences and the extent to which they can do so coherently thus has important implications for clinical interventions.

The Oxford Handbook of Language Production provides a comprehensive, multidisciplinary review of the complex mechanisms involved in language production. It describes what we know of the computational, linguistic, cognitive, and brain basis of human language production - from how we conceive the messages we aim to convey, to how we retrieve the right (and sometimes wrong) words, how we form grammatical sentences, and how we assemble and articulate individual sounds. Contributions from leading psycholinguists, cognitive linguists, and neuroscientists offer readers a broad perspective on the latest research, highlighting key investigations into core aspects of human language processing. The Handbook is organized into three sections: speaking, written and sign languages, and how language production interfaces with the wider cognitive system, including control processes, memory, non-linguistic gestures, and the perceptual system. These chapters discuss a wide array of levels of representation, from sentences to individual words, speech sounds and articulatory gestures, extending to discourse and the broader social context of speaking. Detailed supporting chapters provide an overview of key issues in linguistic structure at each level of representation. Authoritative yet concisely written, the volume will be of interest to scholars and students working in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, audiology, and education, and related fields.

This book analyses changing views on bilingualism in Cognitive Psychology and explores their socio-cultural embeddedness. It offers a new, innovative perspective on the debate on possible cognitive (dis)advantages in bilinguals, arguing that it is biased by popular "language myths", which often manifest themselves in the form of metaphors. Since its beginnings, Cognitive Psychology has consistently modelled the coexistence between languages in the brain using metaphors of struggle, conflict and competition. However, an ideological shift from nationalist and monolingual ideologies to the celebration of bilingualism under multicultural and neoliberal ideologies in the course of the 20th century fostered opposing interpretations of language coexistence in the brain and its effects on bilinguals at different moments in time. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Cognitive Psychology, Psycholinguistics, Multilingualism and Applied Linguistics, Cognitive and Computational Linguistics, and Critical Metaphor Analysis.

As people are living longer on average than ever before, the number of those with dementia will increase. Because many will live a considerable time at home with their diagnosis, we need to know more about the ways people can adapt to and learn to live with dementia in their everyday lives. Lars-Christer Hyden argues in this book that to do so will involve re-imagining what dementia really is and what it can mean to the afflicted and their loved ones. One of the most important everyday opportunities for sharing experiences is the simple act of storytelling. But when someone close to you gradually loses the ability to tell stories and cherish the shared history you have together, this is seen as a threat to the relationship, to the feeling of belonging together, and to the identity of the person diagnosed. Therefore, learning about how people with dementia can participate in storytelling along with their families and friends helps to sustain those relationships and identities. In Entangled Narratives, Hyden not only emphasizes the possibilities that are inherent in collaborative storytelling, but instructs professionals and otherwise healthy relatives to learn how to effectively listen and, ultimately, re-imagine their patients and loved ones as collaborative meaning-makers in their lives.

Neuroethics is concerned with the wide array of ethical, legal and social issues that are raised in research and practice. The field has grown rapidly over the last five years, becoming an active interdisciplinary research area involving a much larger set of academic fields and professions, including law, developmental psychology, neuropsychiatry, and the military.
Neuroethics and Practice helps to define and foster this emerging area at the intersection of neuroethics and clinical neuroscience, which includes neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry and their pediatric subspecialties, as well as neurorehabiliation, clinical neuropsychology, clinical bioethics, and the myriad other clinical specialties (including nursing and geriatrics) in which practitioners grapple with issues of mind and brain. Chatterjee and Farah have brought together leading neuroethicists working in clinically relevant areas to contribute chapters on an intellectually fascinating and clinically important set of neuroethical topics, involving brain enhancements, brain imaging, competence and responsibility, severe brain damage, and consequences of new neurotechnologies. Although this book will be of direct interest to clinicians, as the first edited volume to provide an overall comprehensive perspective on neurethics across disciplines, it is also a unique and useful resource for a wide range of other scholars and students interested in ethics and neuroscience.

This book gathers together novel essays on the state-of-the-art research into the logic and practice of abduction. In many ways, abduction has become established and essential to several fields, such as logic, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy of science, and methodology. In recent years this interest in abduction's many aspects and functions has accelerated. There are evidently several different interpretations and uses for abduction. Many fundamental questions on abduction remain open. How is abduction manifested in human cognition and intelligence? What kinds or types of abduction can be discerned? What is the role for abduction in inquiry and mathematical discovery? The chapters aim at providing answer to these and other current questions. Their contributors have been at the forefront of discussions on abduction, and offer here their updated approaches to the issues that they consider central to abduction's contemporary relevance. The book is an essential reading for any scholar or professional keeping up with disciplines impacted by the study of abductive reasoning, and its novel development and applications in various fields.

'In a time when too many minds seem closed, this is a masterful analysis of what it takes to open them' Adam Grant, author of the bestselling Think Again 'Optimistic, illuminating and even inspiring' Guardian As the world is increasingly polarised, it feels impossible to change the mind of someone with a conflicting view. But this book shows that you could be one conversation away from changing someone's mind about something, maybe a lot of things. Self-delusion expert and psychology nerd David McRaney sets out to discover not just what it takes to influence others, but why we believe in the first place. Along the way he meets a former Westboro Baptist Church member who was deradicalised on Twitter, goes deep canvassing to see how quickly people will surrender their character-defining views, finds a 9/11 Truther who turns his back on it all, and reveals how, within a few years, half a country can go from opposing the 'gay agenda' to happily attending same-sex weddings. Distilling the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, How Minds Change reveals how beliefs take hold, not over hundreds of years, but in less than a generation, in less than a decade, and sometimes in an instant.