This book contains a number of chapters on the control and execution of skilled movements, as well as more general chapters on theoretical issues in skilled performance. The contributors have summarised their most recent research, and general themes and issues are presented in discussion chapters at the end of each section, thus providing a good general summary of the kind of research and theoretical frameworks developing in this area. The first section is concerned with the theoretical issues of programming and co-ordination. Issues raised in the second section are basic to much of the research reviewed in the volume. This section summarises the various theoretical positions in the recent debates on the role of cognitive processes in motor control and the usefulness of the ``psychomotor'' approach, and contains chapters based on individual papers which present relevant empirical findings. The third section deals with the learning and performance of skilled movements, containing papers with practical implications for everyday skills. The final section contains chapters on cognitive processes in skilled performance.

Eugene J. Meehan's immediate purpose in this study is to explain the essentials of a promising approach to measuring and improving cognitive performance, and to summarize the exceptional results obtained thus far from years of experimental applications in the United States and abroad. The approach depends upon two primary constructs: first, a concept labeled cognitive skill or cognitive competence, which is identified with the individual's capacity to acquire, assess, and apply knowledge; and second, a theory of knowledge that is limited in scope but focused on the development and use of knowledge in the conduct of human affairs. Meehan's extended purpose, the reason for being concerned with measuring and improving cognitive competence, is the glaring inadequacy of intellectual performance of those educated in the United States and elsewhere, compared to current needs. This study details the strong theoretical base, examines the process of testing cognitive skill, and investigates the relationship between cognitive skill and real-world achievement. Meehan argues that a useful measure of the concept of cognitive skill testing can be created and stabilized, and that the skills included can be improved selectively and systematically. The book concludes with a discussion of the principal areas of uncertainty, including the long-range effects of cognitive training and the factors that influence retention--particularly in societies that maintain a generally anti-intellectual environment, or where methodological and analytical criticism is not a regular part of everyday practice, even among the well-educated. The significant research, testing, and results which show actual progress in improving educational practice as detailed in this book will interest methodologists, educators, and social scientists.

The author describes the structure and function of the human brain as it pertains to memory.

This book explores the long-term outcomes of severe and ongoing trauma-particularly complex posttraumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD)-from phenomenological and cognitive perspectives. For example, C-PTSD can result in impairments at the body-schema level. In order to survive, trauma victims may conduct their lives at the body-image level, thus producing a mismatch between body schema and body image. In turn, as in the case of somatoparaphrenia and body integrity identity disorder, this incongruity can result in body disownership, which will affect long-term outcomes of severe and ongoing trauma.

The creative process refers to the sequence of thoughts and actions that are involved in the production of new work that is both original and valuable in its context. This book examines this process across the domains of visual art, writing, engineering, design and music. It characterizes each domain's creative process based on evidence stemming from creators' accounts of their own activity and a wide-range of observational material and theories specific to each field. Results from empirical research are then presented across a set of closely linked chapters, using a common set of methodologies that seek to trace the creative process as it unfolds. This highly interdisciplinary edited collection offers valuable insight into the creative process for scholars and practitioners in the fields of psychology, education, and creative studies, as well as for any other readers interested in the creative process. Todd Lubart brings together a group of authors who are themselves actively involved in their respective creative fields and invites readers to adopt a broad perspective on the creative process in order to unravel some of its mysteries.

Now established as an effective tool in the instructional process, multimedia has penetrated educational systems at almost every level of study. In their quest to maximize educational outcomes and identify best practices, multimedia researchers are now expanding their examinations to extend towards the cognitive functionality of multimedia.""Cognitive Effects of Multimedia Learning"" identifies the role and function of multimedia in learning through a collection of research studies focusing on cognitive functionality. An advanced collection of critical theories and practices, this much needed contribution to the research is an essential holding for academic libraries, and will benefit researchers, practitioners and students in basic and applied fields ranging from education to cognitive sciences.

Cognitive informatics is a multidisciplinary field that acts as the bridge between natural science and information science. Specifically, it investigates the potential applications of information processing and natural intelligence to science and engineering disciplines. Transdisciplinary Advancements in Cognitive Mechanisms and Human Information Processing examines innovative research in the emerging, multidisciplinary field of cognitive informatics. Researchers, practitioners and students can benefit from discussions of the connections between natural science and informatics that are investigated in this fundamental collection of cognitive informatics research. This book provides information on the interrelation of the multidisciplinary research area of Cognitive Informatics and the transdisciplinary study of Natural Intelligence.

This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process linguistic or visual information, and what properties in artworks trigger aesthetic experiences. The examination of the properties of aesthetic experience reveals essential aspects of our perceptual, cognitive, and semiotic capacities. The second issue studied in this volume is related to the ontology of the work of art: Written or visual artworks are a specific type of objects, containing particular kinds of representation which elicit a particular kind of experience. The research question explored is: What properties in artful objects trigger this type of experience, and what characterizes representation in written and visual artworks? The volume sets the scene for state-of-the-art inquiries in the intersection between the psychology and ontology of art. The investigations of the relation between the properties of artworks and the characteristics of aesthetic experience increase our insight into what art is. In addition, they shed light on essential properties of human meaning-making in general.

This volume offers an introduction to consciousness research within philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, from a philosophical perspective and with an emphasis on the history of ideas and core concepts. The book begins by examining consciousness as a modern mystery. Thereafter, the book introduces philosophy of mind and the mind-body problem, and proceeds to explore psychological, philosophical and neuroscientific approaches to mind and consciousness. The book then presents a discussion of mysterianist views of consciousness in response to what can be perceived as insurmountable scientific challenges to the problem of consciousness. As a response to mysterianist views, the next chapters examine radical approaches to rethinking the problem of consciousness, including externalist approaches. The final two chapters present the author's personal view of the problem of consciousness. Consciousness remains a mystery for contemporary science-a mystery raising many questions. Why does consciousness persist as a mystery? Are we humans not intelligent enough to solve the riddle of consciousness? If we can solve this mystery, what would it take? What research would we need to conduct? Moreover, the mystery of consciousness prompts the larger question of how well the cognitive sciences have actually advanced our understanding of ourselves as human beings. After all, consciousness is not just a minor part of our existence. Without consciousness, we would not be human beings at all. This book aims to increase the accessibility of major ideas in the field of consciousness research and to inspire readers to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the place of consciousness in nature.

Since Juan Uriagereka originated the multiple spell-out model in 1999 it has been one of the most influential lines of research in syntactic theorizing. The model simplified a crucial element of the minimalist account of language making it a more accurate reflection of syntax and its acquisition. In this book he explores important consequences of the multiple spell-out hypothesis and of the linked notion of cyclicity. He combines the latest thinking in linguistics with perspectives drawn from physics, biology, and animal behavior, aiming thereby to advance the field first described by Noam Chomsky as biolinguistics.
Without simplifying them Professor Uriagereka seeks to present the issues and their broader biological significance clearly and succinctly in ways that are accessible to scholars from adjacent fields with a limited background in linguistics. His analogies and comparisons between linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena (such as the syntax of birdsong) will be of value to both non-linguists and linguists, whose overriding concerns with narrow linguistic questions may sometimes obscure their broader biological significance.
The subjects discussed in the book include the linearization of structure, the punctuated nature of a derivation (the multiple spell-out model), cyclicity and its consequences for locality, and the definition of c-command and its relevance to various types of grammatical dependency. The author discusses the evolutionary implications of his work, considering, for example, whether the punctuated nature of the derivation is a resolution of conflicting demands that yield an equilibrium found in nature more generally. This groundbreaking book will appeal to a wide range of readers in linguistics and cognitive science.

The first book to provide an accessible introduction to neuropsychoanalysis. Covers the theoretical foundations and history of the field, along with an overview of current models relevant to psychoanalysis. It presents the state-of-the-art in neuropsychoanalytic research and theory as well as suggestions for future research and clinical-therapeutic implications.

As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that shape our future circumstances and affect the sort of person we will be. When choosing whether to start a family, or deciding on a career, we often think we can assess the options by imagining what different experiences would be like for us. L. A. Paul argues that, for choices involving dramatically new experiences, we are confronted by the brute fact that we can know very little about our subjective futures. This has serious implications for our decisions. If we make life choices in the way we naturally and intuitively want to-by considering what we care about, and what our future selves will be like if we choose to have the experience-we only learn what we really need to know after we have already committed ourselves. If we try to escape the dilemma by avoiding an experience, we have still made a choice. Choosing rationally, then, may require us to regard big life decisions as choices to make discoveries, small and large, about the intrinsic nature of experience, and to recognize that part of the value of living authentically is to experience one's life and preferences in whatever way they may evolve in the wake of the choices you make. Using classic philosophical examples about the nature of consciousness, and drawing on recent work in normative decision theory, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, Paul develops a rigorous account of transformative experience that sheds light on how we should understand real-world experience and our capacity to rationally map our subjective futures.

Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference extends Wayne Davis's groundbreaking work on the foundations of semantics. Davis revives the classical doctrine that meaning consists in the expression of ideas, and advances the expression theory by showing how it can account for standard proper names, and the distinctive way their meaning determines their reference. He also shows how the theory can handle interjections, syncategorematic terms, conventional implicatures, and other cases long seen as difficult for both ideational and referential theories. The expression theory is founded on the fact that thoughts are event types with a constituent structure, and that thinking is a fundamental propositional attitude, distinct from belief and desire. Thought parts ('ideas' or 'concepts') are distinguished from both sensory images and conceptions. Word meaning is defined recursively: sentences and other complex expressions mean what they do in virtue of what thought parts their component words express and what thought structure the linguistic structure expresses; and unstructured words mean what they do in living languages in virtue of evolving conventions to use them to express ideas. The difficulties of descriptivism show that the ideas expressed by names are atomic or basic. The reference of a name is the extension of the idea it expresses, which is determined not by causal relations, but by its identity or content together with the nature of objects in the world. Hence a name's reference is dependent on, but not identical to, its meaning. A name is directly and rigidly referential because the extension of the idea it expresses is not determined by the extensions of component ideas. The expression theory thus has the strength of Fregeanism without its descriptivist bias, and of Millianism without its referentialist or causalist shortcomings. The referential properties of ideas can be set out recursively by providing a generative theory of ideas, assigning extensions to atomic ideas, and formulating rules whereby the semantic value of a complex idea is determined by the semantic values of its components. Davis also shows how referential properties can be treated using situation semantics and possible worlds semantics. The key is to drop the assumption that the values of intension functions are the referents of the words whose meaning they represent, and to abandon the necessity of identity for logical modalities. Many other pillars of contemporary philosophical semantics, such as the twin earth arguments, are shown to be unfounded.

Industrial Applications of Affective Engineering introduces new analytical methods such as fluctuation, fuzzy logic, fractals, and complex systems, and pursuing interdisciplinary research that traverses a wide range of fields, including information engineering, human engineering, cognitive science, psychology, and design studies. The book is split into two parts: theory and applications. The book is a collection of the best papers from ISAE2013 (International Symposium of Affective Engineering) held at Kitakyushu, Japan and Japan Kansei Engineering Meeting on March 6-8, 2013.

This book brings together a variety of contemporary approaches to learning that by and large follow the structuralist path to understand learning, a path both ecological and dynamic. The book views the learning processes as they take place in the course of personenvironment relationships.

Spatial Neglect is one of the few areas in Neuropsychology where clinicians, psychologists and animal experimenters have succeeded in adopting a common language. The result of interaction between these three approaches has been some important new advances, which are presented in this volume. Apart from its clinical significance in neuropsychology, Spatial Neglect raises important questions in the field of behavioral neurosciences. In this volume, three aspects are examined: a) normal subjects, where new findings on spatial behavior are described. b) brain-lesioned subjects, where the classical studies on neglect are reconsidered in the light of new findings. c) animals, where new experimental situations allow a deeper understanding of the neural substrate.

This is an important thorough book. Guy Boy has presented a masterful review and synthesis of the many factors that affect how people and technology interact in the performance of a task, an understanding that is essential for those who design technology. I strongly recommend it for both students and professionals. -Donald A. Norman, Hewlett-Packard; author of The Invisible Computer "If it is, as I have claimed that AI systems of the future will be less about artificial' intelligence and more about augmented' intelligence, Dr. Boy has produced a veritable handbook on the design of these cognitive prostheses. So sit down, relax, put on your ocular prosthesis and enjoy the read." -Ken Ford, Associate Director, NASA Ames Research Center "This book is a significant first step towards making human-centered design a reality. It provides orientation and guidance for everyone who is concerned with developing systems that integrate people and computers in a context that provides functionality, reliability, flexibility, and responsibility." -Terry Winograd, Professor, Stanford University

In preparing the book the main concern has been to present a comprehensive discussion of the contemporary issues in aphasia therapy, together with constructive consideration of a number of specific therapeutic approaches to a wide range of aphasic problems. Assessment and theory are considered only in terms of their contribution to treatment. Special consideration is also given to the currently developing fields of psychosocial adjustment, psychotherapy and the applications of neuropsychological knowledge and techniques to aphasia rehabilitation and the problems of evaluating the effectiveness of therapeutic intervention. The book should therefore be of relevance and interest to therapists, researchers, lecturers and students in the field of speech pathology, communication disorders, clinical and neuropsychology and neuro- and psycholinguistics.

This volume focuses on persuasion and the structure and analysis of persuasive communication. It brings together contributions from scholars from a variety of backgrounds in communication sciences and psychology, with insights into the processing of persuasive messages, attitude theory as viewed from a neural network model, and models of resistance to influence. This series compiles research from a range of disciplines such as information science, library science, and international relations, that share the unifying purpose of understanding communication and information processing. It offers reviews of those diverse areas that fall within the broad rubrics of information and communication science, as well as an overview of how people use information. The volumes report on research in three important areas: information transfer and information systems; the uses and effects of communications; and the control of communications and information.

In this interdisciplinary discussion on mental models, researchers from various areas in cognitive science tackle the following questions: What is a mental model? What are the prospects and limitations in applying the mental model notion in cognitive science? How can the ideas on the nature of mental models and their mode of operation be empirically substantiated? The primary goal of the research group was to work out a definition of mental models that embraces the overall use of this construct in cognitive science as well as the more specific conceptions used in particular research domains such as cognitive linguistics. Theoretical claims about the properties of mental models were discussed and their tenability evaluated against the empirical evidence.

The volume is divided into three parts. Fundamental aspects of mental models are presented in the first section, the following part contains contributions to the function of mental models in discourse processing, and finally problems of mental models in reasoning and problem solving are outlined.

Some time around their first birthday, children begin to engage in "triadic" interactions, i.e. interactions with adults that turn specifically on both child and adult jointly attending to an object in their surroundings. Recognized as a developmental milestone amongst psychologists for some time, joint attention has recently also started to attract the attention of philosophers. This volume brings together, for the first time, psychological and philosophical perspectives on the nature and significance of joint attention. Original contributions by leading researchers in both disciplines explore the idea that joint attention has a key foundational role to play in the emergence of communicative abilities, psychological understanding, and, possibly, in the very capacity for objective thought.
Contributors:
Dare Baldwin, Josep Call, John Campbell, Naomi Eilan, Fabio Franco, Juan-Carlos Gomez, Jane Heal, R. Peter Hobson, Christoph Hoerl, Sue Leekam, Teresa McCormack, Christopher Peacocke, Vasudevi Reddy, Johannes Roessler, Mark A. Sabbagh, Michael Tomasello, Amanda L. Woodward.