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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Cognition & cognitive psychology
Behavioral and Neural Genetics of Zebrafish assembles the
state-of-the-art methodologies and current concepts pertinent to
their neurobehavioral genetics. Discussing their natural behavior,
motor function, learning and memory, this book focuses on the fry
and adult zebrafish, featuring a comprehensive account of modern
genetic and neural methods adapted to, or specifically developed
for, Danio rerio. Numerous examples of how these behavioral methods
may be utilized for disease models using the zebrafish are
presented, as is a section on bioinformatics and "big-data" related
questions.
Vision dominates philosophical thinking about perception, and
theorizing about experience in cognitive science has traditionally
focused on a visual model. In a radical departure from established
practice, Casey O'Callaghan provides a systematic treatment of
sound and sound experience, and shows how thinking about audition
and appreciating the relationships between multiple sense
modalities can enrich our understanding of perception and the
mind.
Sounds proposes a novel theory of sounds and auditory perception.
Against the widely accepted philosophical view that sounds are
among the secondary or sensible qualities, O'Callaghan argues that,
on any perceptually plausible account, sounds are events. But this
does not imply that sounds are waves that propagate through a
medium, such as air or water. Rather, sounds are events that take
place in one's environment at or near the objects and happenings
that bring them about. This account captures the way in which
sounds essentially are creatures of time, and situates sounds in a
world populated by items and events that have significance for us.
Sounds are not ethereal, mysterious entities.
O'Callaghan's account of sounds and their perception discloses far
greater variety among the kinds of things we perceive than
traditional views acknowledge. But more importantly, investigating
sounds and audition demonstrates that considering other sense
modalities teaches what we could not otherwise learn from thinking
exclusively about the visual. Sounds articulates a powerful account
of echoes, reverberation, Doppler effects, and perceptual
constancies that surpasses the explanatory richness of alternative
theories, and also reveals a number ofsurprising cross-modal
perceptual illusions. O'Callaghan argues that such illusions
demonstrate that the perceptual modalities cannot be completely
understood in isolation, and that the visuocentric model for
theorizing about perception --according to which perceptual
modalities are discrete modes of experience and autonomous domains
of philosophical and scientific inquiry--ought to be abandoned.
Recent research across the disciplines of cognitive science has
exerted a profound influence on how many philosophers approach
problems about the nature of mind. These philosophers, while
attentive to traditional philosophical concerns, are increasingly
drawing both theory and evidence from empirical disciplines - both
the framing of the questions and how to resolve them. However, this
familiarity with the results of cognitive science has led to the
raising of an entirely new set of questions about the mind and how
we study it, questions which not so long ago philosophers did not
even pose, let alone address. This volume offers an overview of
this burgeoning field that balances breadth and depth, with
chapters covering every aspect of the psychology and cognitive
anthropology. Each chapter provides a critical and balanced
discussion of a core topic while also conveying distinctive
viewpoints and arguments. Several of the chapters are co-authored
collaborations between philosophers and scientists.
Over recent years, the psychology of concepts has been rejuvenated
by new work on prototypes, inventive ideas on causal cognition, the
development of neo-empiricist theories of concepts, and the inputs
of the budding neuropsychology of concepts. But our empirical
knowledge about concepts has yet to be organized in a coherent
framework.
In Doing without Concepts, Edouard Machery argues that the dominant
psychological theories of concepts fail to provide such a framework
and that drastic conceptual changes are required to make sense of
the research on concepts in psychology and neuropsychology. Machery
shows that the class of concepts divides into several distinct
kinds that have little in common with one another and that for this
very reason, it is a mistake to attempt to encompass all known
phenomena within a single theory of concepts. In brief, concepts
are not a natural kind. Machery concludes that the theoretical
notion of concept should be eliminated from the theoretical
apparatus of contemporary psychology and should be replaced with
theoretical notions that are more appropriate for fulfilling
psychologists' goals. The notion of concept has encouraged
psychologists to believe that a single theory of concepts could be
developed, leading to useless theoretical controversies between the
dominant paradigms of concepts. Keeping this notion would slow
down, and maybe prevent, the development of a more adequate
classification and would overshadow the theoretical and empirical
issues that are raised by this more adequate classification. Anyone
interested in cognitive science's emerging view of the mind will
find Machery's provocative ideas of interest.
Causal reasoning is one of our most central cognitive competencies,
enabling us to adapt to our world. Causal knowledge allows us to
predict future events, or diagnose the causes of observed facts. We
plan actions and solve problems using knowledge about cause-effect
relations. Although causal reasoning is a component of most of our
cognitive functions, it has been neglected in cognitive psychology
for many decades. The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning offers a
state-of-the-art review of the growing field, and its contribution
to the world of cognitive science. The Handbook begins with an
introduction of competing theories of causal learning and
reasoning. In the next section, it presents research about basic
cognitive functions involved in causal cognition, such as
perception, categorization, argumentation, decision-making, and
induction. The following section examines research on domains that
embody causal relations, including intuitive physics, legal and
moral reasoning, psychopathology, language, social cognition, and
the roles of space and time. The final section presents research
from neighboring fields that study developmental, phylogenetic, and
cultural differences in causal cognition. The chapters, each
written by renowned researchers in their field, fill in the gaps of
many cognitive psychology textbooks, emphasizing the crucial role
of causal structures in our everyday lives. This Handbook is an
essential read for students and researchers of the cognitive
sciences, including cognitive, developmental, social, comparative,
and cross-cultural psychology; philosophy; methodology; statistics;
artificial intelligence; and machine learning.
Trust is at the root of all positive relationships. This accessible
and empowering book teaches how to form an inner circle of trusted
confidants in your workplace and at home that will allow you to
live a more peaceful and more effective life, reduce stress, and
better deal with negative emotions. Building trust is crucial for
effective leadership, and trusting others is a necessary part of
working with others. But knowing whom to trust-and whom not to
trust-eludes many people. A surprising number of people report that
being betrayed by someone in their "inner circle" either at work or
in their personal lives is one of the most devastating things they
have endured. Lack of trust is also expensive in that it costs
companies money to surveil employees; and in our personal lives, if
we live with people we cannot trust, we expend needless amounts of
energy protecting ourselves from these untrustworthy people. How do
we increase trust, bounce back from betrayal, and form alliances
and positive relationships with those who ARE trustworthy? This
book provides a unique examination of trust and its
often-overlooked importance to our work and personal lives. It
identifies the characteristics of a trusting relationship,
considers the decision-making process that people should make
before granting individuals admission to their own "inner circle,"
and teaches how to tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys" in our
work environments and life in general. This revised and updated
edition contains new information on the negative mental and
physical aspects of telling lies; how to better manage our
emotions, which allows us to become "better guys" ourselves;
strategies for building more trusting relationships in our
families; and how trust works-and doesn't work-online in the
Internet age. It also includes a useful "Family Board Meeting" tool
for having family meetings in a way that encourages honest and open
dialogue between family members regardless of age or family
structure. Presents a system for assessing "the good guys and the
bad guys"-in other words, the trustworthy and untrustworthy people
that surround all of us in every arena of life Provides tools for
assessing our own trustworthiness as well as for evaluating our own
willingness to trust another Gives readers effective methods for
dealing with forgiveness, coping, and reconciliation; managing
"conditional" trust relationships; and for becoming more
trustworthy to themselves Suggests a practical "Honesty Challenge"
that dares readers to be more truthful-and as a result, more
successful
The Chomskian revolution in linguistics gave rise to a new
orthodoxy about mind and language. Michael Devitt throws down a
provocative challenge to that orthodoxy. What is linguistics about?
What role should linguistic intuitions play in constructing
grammars? What is innate about language? Is there a 'language
faculty'? These questions are crucial to our developing
understanding of ourselves; Michael Devitt offers refreshingly
original answers. He argues that linguistics is about linguistic
reality and is not part of psychology; that linguistic rules are
not represented in the mind; that speakers are largely ignorant of
their language; that speakers' intuitions do not reflect
information supplied by the language faculty and are not the main
evidence for grammars; that the rules of 'Universal Grammar' are
largely, if not entirely, innate structure rules of thought;
indeed, that there is little or nothing to the language faculty.
Devitt's controversial theses will prove highly stimulating to
anyone working on language and the mind.
Our experience of objects (and consequently our theorizing about
them) is very rich. We perceive objects as possessing individuation
conditions. They appear to have boundaries in space and time, for
example, and they appear to move independently of a background of
other objects or a landscape. In Ontology Without Boundaries Jody
Azzouni undertakes an analysis of our concept of object, and shows
what about that notion is truly due to the world and what about it
is a projection onto the world of our senses and thinking. Location
and individuation conditions are our product: there is no echo of
them in the world. Features, the ways that objects seem to be,
aren't projections. Azzouni shows how the resulting austere
metaphysics tames a host of ancient philosophical problems about
constitution ("Ship of Theseus," "Sorities"), as well as
contemporary puzzles about reductionism. In addition, it's shown
that the same sorts of individuation conditions for properties,
which philosophers use to distinguish between various kinds of odd
abstracta-universals, tropes, and so on, are also projections.
Accompanying our notion of an object is a background logic that
makes cogent ontological debate about anything from Platonic
objects to Bigfoot. Contemporary views about this background logic
("quantifier variance") make ontological debate incoherent. Azzouni
shows how a neutral interpretation of quantifiers and quantifier
domains makes sense of both philosophical and pre-philosophical
ontological debates. Azzouni also shows how the same apparatus
makes sense of our speaking about a host of items-Mickey Mouse,
unicorns, Martians-that nearly all of us deny exist. It's allowed
by what Azzouni shows about the background logic of our ontological
debates, as well as the semantics of the language of those debates
that we can disagree over the existence of things, like unicorns,
without that background logic and semantics forcing ontological
commitments onto speakers that they don't have.
The 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. Volume 46 contains chapters on
category learning, prototypes, prospective memory, event memory,
memory models, and musical prosody.
*Discusses the concepts of category learning, prototypes,
prospective memory, event memory, memory models, and musical
prosody
*Volume 46 of the highly regarded Psychology of Learning and
Motivation series
*An essential reference for researchers and academics in cognitive
science
Magnetic resonance imaging methods have taken a commanding position
in brain studies because they allow scientists to follow brain
activities in the living human. The ability to measure cerebral
anatomy, neuronal firing and brain metabolism has extended and
re-invigorated hopes of understanding the role that brain activity
plays in human life. The brain has assumed a central role in our
thinking of the world that can be traced back to the philosophies
that are expressed in psychology, religion, literature, and
everyday life. Brain scientists, planning and measuring brain
activities by imaging methods, have consciously or unconsciously
been influenced by these philosophical views. This book, in
describing the experiments using imaging methods, traces how
assumptions about the nature of brain function made in planning
scientific experiments are the consequences of philosophical
positions. Experiments that relate brain activities to observable
behavior are shown to avoid the philosophical and psychological
assumptions about mental processes that have been proposed to
underlie these behaviors. These promising, empirical experiments
are consistent with the philosophy of Pragmatism which, in judging
hypotheses about understanding by their consequences, has
questioned the value of everyday conceptualizations of brain
activity for imaging studies.
Time Distortions in Mind brings together current research on
aspects of temporal processing in clinical populations, in the
ultimate hope of elucidating the interdependence between
perturbations in timing and disturbances in the mind and brain.
Such research may inform not only typical psychological
functioning, but may also elucidate the psychological consequences
of any pathophysiological differences in temporal processing. This
collection of current knowledge on temporal processing in clinical
populations is an excellent reference for the student and scientist
interested in the topic, but it also serves as the stepping-stone
to share ideas and push forward the advancement in understanding
how distorted timing can lead to a disturbed brain and mind or vice
versa. Contributors to this volume: Ryan D. Ward, Billur Avlar,
Peter D Balsam, Deana B. Davalos, Jamie Opper, Yvonne
Delevoye-Turrell, Helene Wilquin, Mariama Dione, Anne Giersch,
Laurence Lalanne, Mitsouko van Assche, Patrick E. Poncelet, Mark A.
Elliott, Deborah L. Harrington, Stephen M. Rao, Catherine R.G.
Jones, Marjan Jahanshahi, Bon-Mi Gu, Anita J. Jurkowski, Jessica I.
Lake, Chara Malapani, Warren H. Meck, Rebecca M. C. Spencer, Dawn
Wimpory, Brad Nicholas, Elzbieta Szelag, Aneta Szymaszek, Anna
Oron, Melissa J. Allman, Christine M. Falter, Argiro Vatakis,
Alexandra Elissavet Bakou
Language plays a major role in our daily lives. Humans are
specialized to live in a social environment, and our brains are
"designed" to manage interactions with others which are, for the
most part, accomplished through words. Language allows us to
function both cognitively and interpersonally, and without language
there are constraints on our ability to interact with others.
Language also plays a major role in that specialized form of
interpersonal interaction that we call psychotherapy or
psychoanalysis. In that setting we use words to express and
communicate meaning clearly, and through spoken language we help
our patients to organize and modify their experiences of self and
of the world, fostering adaptive change. Like the air we breathe,
when our language serves its function it is transparent to us. We
notice it most when it fails. When it does fail its basic function,
in life and in psychotherapy, it fails to reliably, effectively,
and comfortably help us to connect with others, as we deal with the
world around us. In Language and Connection in Psychotherapy: Words
Matter, Dr. Mary Davis addresses the role of language in our lives,
both internally, in creating psychic structure and regulating
affect, and interpersonally, in facilitating relationships with the
figures that have shaped our development and that inhabit our adult
lives. Using clinical material to illustrate, Davis looks at the
development of language and its role in creating our personalities,
at the life events which can distort our use of language to
interact with others, and the ways that language can lead to
misunderstanding as well as to understanding. Throughout, Language
and Connection in Psychotherapy: Words Matter explores various
facets of the ways in which words matter as well as the times when
words are important but not sufficient to our ability to
communicate interpersonally. Davis suggests that the
psychotherapist is a master in bridging the gap between being and
saying: she can be conceptualized as an "interpreter," one who
turns behavioral language into verbal language, action language
into words, emotions into thoughts, who focuses and uses the
capacity of words to help us connect both with our internal selves
and with others.
The science of intelligence has created a plethora of theories and
measurements, which have various applications of both
computational, social, and managerial significance. Relational
Thinking Styles and Natural Intelligence: Assessing Inference
Patterns for Computational Modeling explores a specific set of
intelligence theories, unifying and quantifying to create a
verifiable model of various inferencing habits. Relational Thinking
Styles suggests that the inferencing patterns described and
demonstrated by this model may provide a platform from which to
examine and integrate various aspects of natural intelligence and
how these are expressed. This research provides valuable
information for businesses, social services, and any
decision-making process involving intelligence assessment.
How can we best describe the processes by which we visually
perceive our environment? Contemporary perceptual theory still
lacks a coherent theoretical position that encompasses both the
limitations on the information that can be retained from a single
eye fixation and the abundant phenomenal and behavioral evidence
for the perception of an extended and coherent world. As a result,
many leading theorists and researchers in visual perception are
turning with new or renewed interest to the work of Julian
Hochberg.
For over 50 years, in his own experimental research, in his
detailed consideration of examples drawn from a wide range of
visual experiences and activities, and most of all in his brilliant
and sophisticated theoretical analyses, Hochberg has persistently
engaged with the myriad problems inherent in working out the kind
of coherent theoretical position the field currently lacks. The
complexity of his thought and the wide range of areas into which
Hochberg has pursued the solution to this central problem have,
however, limited both the accessibility of his work and the
appreciation of his accomplishment.
In this volume we seek to bring the full range of Hochberg's work
to the attention of a wider audience by offering a selection of his
key works, many taken from out-of-print or relatively inaccessible
sources. To facilitate the understanding of his accomplishment, and
of what his work has to offer to contemporary researchers and
theorists in visual perception, we include commentaries on salient
aspects of his work by 20 noted researchers.
In the Mind's Eye will be of interest to researchers working on
topics such as perceptual organization, visual attention,
spaceperception, motion perception, visual cognition, the
relationship between perception and action, picture perception, and
film, who are striving to obtain a deeper understanding of their
own fields, and who want to integrate this understanding into a
broader, unified view of visual perceptual processing.
The four authors of this book recognize that no one on the
common human journey to the 21st century can pick the best route
without consulting a map--that is to say, an interconnected set of
understandings about what in a given situation is important, what
demands action and attention, and what does not. The problem, they
contend, is that the picture of the world we each carry in our mind
may not be a true mapping of the reality that surrounds us. This
picture, the cognitive map, could always be sharper. The authors
prompt us to become more conscious of our own cognitive map, and
explain how it can be adapted to the exigencies of our changing
world so that it can be better-used to guide our steps toward the
21st century.
We all carry a picture of the world in our mind, but is that map
an assuredly true layout of the reality that surrounds us? If not,
how can we use it to guide our steps toward the 21st century and
beyond without creating shocks and surprises that impair our
well-being and threaten our survival?
We shall not survive, either as individuals or as a species, if
our maps fail to reflect accurately the nature of the world that
surrounds us. The authors attempt, through reviewing the origins,
development, and current changes in individual and social cognitive
maps, to prompt readers to become more conscious of their own map,
and hence be better able to adapt it to the exigencies of our
changing world. The book ends with a vision of the global bio- and
socio-sphere: the unified cognitive map which is emerging in
laboratories and workshops of the new physics, the new biology, the
new ecology, and the avant-garde branches of the social and
historical sciences. But "Changing Visions" recognizes that these
sciences alone cannot promote the formation of faithful maps of
lived reality, and that religion, common sense, and even art can
fill in and sharpen one's world-picture.
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