This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

* Draws on work across multiple disciplines, from astrobiology and physics to linguistics and the social sciences, making it appealing to graduates from a wide variety of fields. * The first accessible introduction into the important work of philosopher Howard Pattee. * Aims to equip readers with new approaches to simple and complex systems theory to take into any respective discipline.

John Gibbons presents an original account of epistemic normativity. Belief seems to come with a built-in set of standards or norms. One task is to say where these standards come from. But the more basic task is to say what those standards are. In some sense, beliefs are supposed to be true. Perhaps they're supposed to constitute knowledge. And in some sense, they really ought to be reasonable. Which, if any of these is the fundamental norm of belief? The Norm of Belief argues against the teleological or instrumentalist conception of rationality that sees being reasonable as a means to our more objective aims, either knowledge or truth. And it tries to explain both the norms of knowledge and of truth in terms of the fundamental norm, the one that tells you to be reasonable. But the importance of being reasonable is not explained in terms of what it will get you, or what you think it will get you, or what it would get you if only things were different. The requirement to be reasonable comes from the very idea of what a genuine requirement is. That is where the built-in standards governing belief come from, and that is what they are.

During the past twenty years, our knowledge about expertise has dramatically increased. Laboratory analyses of chessmasters, experts in physics, medicine, international-level musicians, athletes, writers, and performance artists have allowed us to carefully examine the cognitive processes mediating outstanding performance in very diverse areas of expertise. These analyses have shown that expert performance is primarily a reflection of acquired skill resulting from the accumulation of domain-specific knowledge and methods during many years of training and practice rather than special innate talent. Confronted with universal limits of human information processing concerning memory capacity and speed of processing, expert performers are found to be able to acquire similar types of skills to circumvent these limits. General findings on expertise are systematized to lay the foundation of a general theory of expertise. In this book, many of the world's foremost scientists studying expert performance in specific domains of expertise review the state-of-the-art knowledge about expertise in these domains with the goal of identifying characteristics of expert performance that can be generalized across many different areas of expertise. These papers provide a comprehensive summary of general methods to study expertise and the current knowledge about expertise in chess, physics, medicine, sports, performing arts, music, writing, and decision-making. Most importantly, they reveal the existence of many general characteristics of expertise.

Steve Croker's The Development of Cognition is an exciting new text which offers a refreshing and contemporary account of the major theories and practical applications of children's cognitive development from infancy onwards. Written in a clear and accessible style this comprehensive text enables students to carefully examine and critically assess the processes through which development occurs, together with the nature of the changes in language, perception, memory, conceptual understanding and problem-solving that take place. The Development of Cognition is ideally suited for cognitive development modules typically taught in the second and third years of undergraduate psychology courses throughout the world.

Human cognition increasingly is coming to be understood and studied as something that does not necessarily reside within individuals, but rather as something that evolves through interpersonal communication. Using the interpersonal event as the unit of analysis, the authors of "Collaborative Cognition" examine how children interactively co-construct knowledge and ways of knowing in social contexts. In an illustration of the idea that thinking is as much interactive as self-reflective--one that supports the cognitive developmental theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky--this important new study examines the social origins of thought, and the inherently discursive nature of thinking itself.

The social context in question was created by the authors, who showed to pairs of children a variety of game materials and asked them to collaborate on creating a board game. Negotiating the co-construction of a game, back and forth, turn by turn, enabled the children to construct jointly a series of mutually obligatory goals and rules that sequentially defined the evolution of increasingly more complex modes of play. This innovative use of sequential analyses to study evolving streams of conversation discourse represents a fully process-oriented, rather than outcome-oriented, approach to studying cognitive development.

The distinguished contributors to this volume have been set the problem of describing how we know where to move our eyes. There is a great deal of current interest in the use of eye movement recordings to investigate various mental processes. The common theme is that variations in eye movements indicate variations in the processing of what is being perceived, whether in reading, driving or scene perception. However, a number of problems of interpretation are now emerging, and this edited volume sets out to address these problems. The book investigates controversies concerning the variations in eye movements associated with reading ability, concerning the extent to which text is used by the guidance mechanism while reading, concerning the relationship between eye movements and the control of other body movements, the relationship between what is inspected and what is perceived, and concerning the role of visual control attention in the acquisition of complex perceptual-motor skills, in addition to the nature of the guidance mechanism itself.
The origins of the volume are in discussions held at a meeting of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP) that was held in Wurzburg in September 1996. The discussions concerned the landing effect in reading, an effect, that if substantiated, would provide evidence of the use of parafoveal information in eye guidance, and these discussions were explored in more detail at a small meeting in Chamonix, in February 1997. Many of the contributors to this volume were present at the meeting, but the arguments were not resolved in Chamonix either. Other leaders in the field were invited to contribute to the discussion, and this volume is the product. The argument remains unresolved, but the problem is certainly clearer.

Old age is currently the greatest risk factor for developing dementia. Since older people make up a larger portion of the population than ever before, the resulting increase in the incidence of dementia presents a major challenge for society. Dementia is complex and multifaceted and impacts not only the person with the diagnosis but also those caring for them and society as a whole. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design and development are pivotal in enabling people with dementia to live well and be supported in the communities around them. HCI is increasingly addressing the need for inclusivity and accessibility in the design and development of new technologies, interfaces, systems, services, and tools. Using interdisciplinary approaches HCI engages with the complexities and 'messiness' of real-world design spaces to provide novel perspectives and new ways of addressing the challenge of dementia and multi-stakeholder needs. HCI and Design in the Context of Dementia brings together the work of international experts, designers and researchers working across disciplines. It provides methodologies, methods and frameworks, approaches to participatory engagement and case studies showing how technology can impact the lives of people living with dementia and those around them. It includes examples of how to conduct dementia research and design in-context in the field of HCI, ethically and effectively and how these issues transcend the design space of dementia to inform HCI design and technology development more broadly. The book is valuable for and aimed at designers, researchers, scholars and caregivers that work with vulnerable groups like people with dementia, and those directly impacted.

We all daydream and yet the purpose of waking fantasy, or episodes of conscious and private fiction-making, has never been really clarified. Instead, mainstream psychology characterises the daydream as task-distracted mind wandering, which does little to explain why people engage in creating fictions of often unrealizable proportions regularly for themselves, at times incidentally and at other times deliberately. This work overturns, re-organises and redefines established concepts of the role of waking fantasy in human life. It shows how the purpose of all fantasy is to transform mood states into specific emotional responses, a feature apparent in daydreams, sexual fantasies and even unconscious fantasy structures. Understanding how feeling states motivate fantasy explains why we daydream at all, how repetitive daydreams and sexual fantasies develop to elicit reliable emotional reactions, and even how we at times use and appropriate published or released fictional works to propagate our own fantasies. Along the way, the work explores the relation of waking fantasy to some of our buying practices, attachments to objects in early childhood, preferred genres of fiction and cultural phenomena such as the worship of celebrities.

Do memory abilities decline with aging? Are changes in memory universal or differential? Do they occur similarly or differently for all types of memory and to all aging persons? These are some of the principal questions explored in the Victoria Longitudinal Study and presented in this volume. Although there is a large amount of research comparing the memory performance of younger and older adults, few studies have followed the same older adults over time. Only through the use of such longitudinal methods can one directly observe changes in memory functioning with aging. This monograph reports recent longitudinal data following the same individuals over a six-year period. The authors consider a variety of theoretical and methodological issues related to memory and aging. In addition, they report analyses of data to examine questions such as: are average changes in performance associated with age, cohort, or both? are there substantial individual differences in memory change in later life or are people changing in similar fashion?; and what component processes predict changes in complex memory performance in adulthood?

What mediates between sensory input and motor output? This is probably the most basic question one can ask about the mind. There is stimulation on your retina, something happens in your skull and then you hand reaches out to grab the apple in front of you. What is it that happens in between? What representations make it possible for you to grab this apple? Bence Nanay calls these representations that make it possible for you to grab the apple 'pragmatic representations'. In Between Perception and Action he argues that pragmatic representations whose function is to mediate between sensory input and motor output play an immensely important role in our mental life. And they help us to explain why the vast majority of what goes on in our mind is very similar to the simple mental processes of animals. The human mind, like the mind of non-human animals, has been selected for allowing us to perform actions successfully. And the vast majority of our actions, like the actions of non-human animals, could not be performed without perceptual guidance. And what provides the perceptual guidance for performing actions are pragmatic representations. If we accept this framework, many classic questions in philosophy of perception and of action will look very different. The aim of this book is to trace the various consequences of this way of thinking about the mind in a number of branches of philosophy as well as in psychology and cognitive science.

Are human tendencies toward religious and spiritual thoughts, feelings, and actions outcomes of "natural" cognition? This volume revisits the "naturalness theory of religious cognition" through discussion of new qualitative and quantitative studies examining the psychological foundations of religious and spiritual expression in historical and contemporary China. Naturalness theory has been challenged on the grounds that little of its supporting developmental and experimental research has drawn on participants from predominantly secular cultural environments. Given China's official secularity, its large proportion of atheists, and its alleged long history of dominant, nonreligious philosophies, can any broad claim for religion's psychological "naturalness" be plausible? Addressing this empirical gap, the studies discussed in this volume support core naturalness theory predictions for human reasoning about supernatural agency, intelligent design, the efficacy of rituals, and vitalistic causality. And yet each study elucidates, expands upon, or even challenges outright the logical assumptions of the naturalness theory. Written for a non-specialist audience, this volume introduces the naturalness theory and frames the significance of these new findings for students and scholars of cultural psychology, the psychology of religion, the anthropology of religion, and Chinese Studies.

From the Preface: Blending ideas from operations research, music psychology, music theory, and cognitive science, this book aims to tell a coherent story of how tonality pervades our experience, and hence our models, of music. The story is told through the developmental stages of the Spiral Array model for tonality, a geometric model designed to incorporate and represent principles of tonal cognition, thereby lending itself to practical applications of tonal recognition, segmentation, and visualization. Mathematically speaking, the coils that make up the Spiral Array model are in effect helices, a spiral referring to a curve emanating from a central point. The use of "spiral" here is inspired by spiral staircases, intertwined spiral staircases: nested double helices within an outer spiral. The book serves as a compilation of knowledge about the Spiral Array model and its applications, and is written for a broad audience, ranging from the layperson interested in music, mathematics, and computing to the music scientist-engineer interested in computational approaches to music representation and analysis, from the music-mathematical and computational sciences student interested in learning about tonality from a formal modeling standpoint to the computer musician interested in applying these technologies in interactive composition and performance. Some chapters assume no musical or technical knowledge, and some are more musically or computationally involved.

. . . Mr. Itzkoff places most of the blame for America's alleged intellectual decline on what he sees as an economically and intellectually elite cast of misguided liberals. They have isolated themselves from American society, he says, by their paternalistic treatment of the underclass, by discounting the importance of traditional family values and by failing to raise enough bright children to sustain national competence. The New York Times Book Review Few doubt that the United States has slipped from its longstanding eminence as the world's wealthiest and most productive nation. The problem for the past 30 years has been the diagnosis of both the decline and then the cure. Literally trillions of dollars have been expended in futile programs to stanch the hemorrhaging of our economic wealth, jobs, educational achievement, and cultural elan. Itzkoff argues that we will never stop the fall until we understand our real national dilemma. This is the decline in our national intelligence profile: fewer citizens of high intelligence, educational potential, and economic productivity. These ideas are taboo. Itzkoff, however, insists that these are the facts, and they must be examined. In this book, he lays out the available evidence for our social disintegration and suggests a rational program of policy initiatives that would begin to restore us to what we were as recently as 1955--the great hope of the world.

Psychological research using time as a variable has been extensive since the era of Wundt and Ebbinghaus. The care of and research on dementia patients highlights a unique need for understanding and applying the concepts of time and space. This volume, unique in its development of a model for time-space orientation, proposes that understanding the needs of these patients is increased by consideration of the DEGREESIdis DEGREESRorientation caused by dementia. Included is a review of the history of time and time measurement, a survey of psychological literature using time as a variable across the life span, and a model of time orientation applied to persons who have developed dementia.

Conditions leading to dementia are described, and a rationale proposed for the effects of time/space disorientation in behavioral disturbances. Suggestions for applications and future research are included. Scholars and researchers interested in time awareness and orientation, as well as professionals in psychology, sociology, and gerontology caring for dementia patients, will find the material here useful.

Philosophers have usually argued that the right way to explain people's actions is in terms of their beliefs and intentions rather than in terms of objective facts. Rowland Stout takes the opposite line in his account of action. Appeal to teleology is widely regarded with suspicion, but Dr Stout argues that there are things in nature, namely actions, which can be teleologically explained: they happen because they serve some end. Moreover, this teleological explanation is externalist: it cites facts about the world, not beliefs and intentions which only represent the world. Such externalism about the explanation of action is a natural partner to externalism about knowledge and about reference, but has hardly ever been considered seriously before. One dramatic consequence of such a position is that it opens up the possibility of a behaviourist account of beliefs and intentions.

Children's Thinking: Cognitive Development and Individual Differences, Seventh Edition by David Bjorklund remains the most comprehensive and current topical textbook available in cognitive development. The text presents up-to-date, thorough research studies and data throughout. Bjorklund expertly introduce readers to the concept of developmental function, which explains that healthy children can individually vary in their cognition as they develop. This concept is discussed throughout the text within the context of the typical progression of cognitive development through infancy and childhood. In addition, the text includes framework showing that, although some traits are established at birth, children's cognitive development is also shaped by the physical and social environments that surround them throughout their formative years. The seventh edition has been updated to include current and extensive research, sociocultural coverage, evolutionary coverage of memory development, children's development of prosocial cognition, moral development, and the concept of overimitation.

From Subject to Subjectivities profiles the recent debates about the role of qualitative and participatory methods in psychology, a discipline which has traditionally seen itself as a form of positivistic science. Contributors explain how fundamentally different views of the nature of reality and of scientific theory have shaped these debates, and how psychology is being transformed through the use of these methods.

At the heart of the book are 10 exemplars of interpretive and participatory action research which describe the rationale for and process of using these methods in actual cases. They also articulate some of the challenges psychologists may face in adopting them, offering insights into how these complications can be successfully negotiated. Relevant beyond psychology, the models provided can be used within the context of a wide array of social science disciplines, from sociology and anthropology to women's studies and public health.

The contributors represent a veritable "who's who" of qualitative scholars, including Lyn Mikel Brown, Larry Davidson, Michelle Fine, Louise Kidder, M. Brinton Lykes, Jeanne Marecek, Abigail Stewart, and Niobe Way.

No previous book has examined qualitative and participatory methods specifically within the context of psychology. From Subjects to Subjectivities provides a unique and badly needed resource for those interested in learning about the practice of these methods in the field.

Philosophy of mind is one of the core disciplines in philosophy. The questions that it deals with are profound, vexed and intriguing. This volume of 15 new cutting-edge essays gives young researchers a chance to stir up new ideas. The topics covered include the nature of consciousness, cognition, and action.

This book examines the relationship between educational psychology and neuropsychology. It is based on the findings from two original research studies - a national survey looking at educational psychologists' views on neuropsychology; and interviews exploring the specialist role of educational psychologists in neuropsychological settings. The book considers key questions such as: Is neuropsychology applicable to educational psychologists' day-to-day practice, or is it primarily a specialism? What is the role and unique contribution of educational psychologists working in child neuropsychological settings? Why are educational psychologists underrepresented amongst neuropsychologists and what does the training route entail? The book also considers why neuro-based concepts are so appealing to educators and the general public and explores the most prevalent misconceptions and neuromyths in education. Overall, the book aims to provide a unified account of the complex relationship between the disciplines through the voice of educational psychologists themselves and challenges some of the misconceptions about child neuropsychology as a specialism.

Is a pear sweeter than a peach? Which of Mona Lisa's hands is crossed over the other? What would the Moonlight Sonata sound like played by a brass band? Although these are questions that appeal to mental imagery in a variety of sensory modalities, mental imagery research has been dominated by visual imagery. With the emergence of a well-established multisensory research community, however, it is time to look at mental imagery in a wider sensory context. Part I of this book provides overviews of unisensory imagery in each sensory modality, including motor imagery, together with discussions of multisensory and cross-modal interactions, synesthesia, imagery in the blind and following brain damage, and methodological considerations. Part II reviews the application of mental imagery research in a range of settings including individual differences, skilled performance such as sports and surgical training, psychopathology and therapy, through to stroke rehabilitation. This combination of comprehensive coverage of the senses with reviews from both theoretical and applied perspectives not only complements the growing multisensory literature but also responds to recent calls for translational research in the multisensory field.