This work presents a new theory of how children acquire language and discusses its implications for a wide range of topics. It explores the roles of innateness and experience in language acquisition, provides further evidence for the theory of Universal Grammar, and shows how linguistic development in children is a driving force behind language shifts and changes Charles Yang surveys a wide range of errors in children's language and identifies overlooked patterns. He combines these with work in biological evolution in order to develop a model of language acquisition by which to understand the interaction between children's internal linguistic knowledge and their external linguistic experience. He then presents evidence from his own and others' research in the acquisition of syntax and morphology and data from historical language change to test its validity The model is makes quantitative and cross-linguistic predictions about child language. It may also be deployed as a predictive model of language change which, when the evidence is available, could explain why grammars change in a particular direction at a particular time.

Cognitive Science is an avowedly multidisciplinary field, drawing upon many traditional disciplines or research areas-including Linguistics, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology, Artificial Intelligence, and Education-that contribute to our understanding of cognition. Just as learning and memory cannot truly prove effective as disconnected studies, practical applications of cognitive research, such as the improvement of education and human-computer interaction, require dealing with more complex cognitive phenomena by integrating the methods and insights from multiple traditional disciplines. The societal need for such applications has played an important role in the development of cognitive science. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Science emphasizes the research and theory that is most central to modern cognitive science. Sections of the volume address computational theories of human cognitive architecture; cognitive functioning, such as problem solving and decision making as they have been studied with both experimental methods and formal modeling approaches; and cognitive linguistics and the advent of big data. Chapters provide concise introductions to the present achievements of cognitive science, supplemented by references to suggested reading, and additional facets of cognitive science are discussed in the handbook's introductory chapter, complementing other key publications to access for further study. With contributions from among the best representatives in their fields, this volume will appeal as the critical resource for the students in training who determine the future of cognitive science.

Judgment, Decision-Making, and Embodied Choices introduces a new concept of embodied choices which take sensorimotor experiences into account when limited time and resources forces a person to make a quick decision. This book combines areas of cognitive psychology and movement science, presenting an integrative approach to understanding human functioning in everyday scenarios. This is the first book focusing on the role of the gut as a second brain, introducing the link to risky behavior. The book's author engages readers by providing real-life experiences and scenarios connecting theory to practice.

Pushing back against the potential trivialization of moral psychology that would reduce it to emotional preferences, this book takes an enactivist, self-organizational, and hermeneutic approach to internal conflict between a basic exploratory drive motivating the search for actual truth, and opposing incentives to confabulate in the interest of conformity, authoritarianism, and cognitive dissonance, which often can lead to harmful worldviews. The result is a new possibility that ethical beliefs can have truth value and are not merely a result of ephemeral altruistic or cooperative feelings. It will interest moral and political psychologists, philosophers, social scientists, and all who are concerned with inner emotional conflicts driving ethical thinking beyond mere emotivism, and toward moral realism, albeit a fallibilist one requiring continual rethinking and self-reflection. It combines 'basic emotion' theories (such as Panksepp) with hermeneutic depth psychology. The result is a realist approach to moral thinking emphasizing coherence rather than foundationalist theory of knowledge.

The story of a neural impulse and what it reveals about how our brains work We see the last cookie in the box and think, can I take that? We reach a hand out. In the 2.1 seconds that this impulse travels through our brain, billions of neurons communicate with one another, sending blips of voltage through our sensory and motor regions. Neuroscientists call these blips "spikes." Spikes enable us to do everything: talk, eat, run, see, plan, and decide. In The Spike, Mark Humphries takes readers on the epic journey of a spike through a single, brief reaction. In vivid language, Humphries tells the story of what happens in our brain, what we know about spikes, and what we still have left to understand about them. Drawing on decades of research in neuroscience, Humphries explores how spikes are born, how they are transmitted, and how they lead us to action. He dives into previously unanswered mysteries: Why are most neurons silent? What causes neurons to fire spikes spontaneously, without input from other neurons or the outside world? Why do most spikes fail to reach any destination? Humphries presents a new vision of the brain, one where fundamental computations are carried out by spontaneous spikes that predict what will happen in the world, helping us to perceive, decide, and react quickly enough for our survival. Traversing neuroscience's expansive terrain, The Spike follows a single electrical response to illuminate how our extraordinary brains work.

The study of metaphor is now firmly established as a central topic within cognitive science and the humanities. We marvel at the creative dexterity of gifted speakers and writers for their special talents in both thinking about certain ideas in new ways, and communicating these thoughts in vivid, poetic forms. Yet metaphors may not only be special communicative devices, but a fundamental part of everyday cognition in the form of 'conceptual metaphors'. An enormous body of empirical evidence from cognitive linguistics and related disciplines has emerged detailing how conceptual metaphors underlie significant aspects of language, thought, cultural and expressive action. Despite its influence and popularity, there have been major criticisms of conceptual metaphor. This book offers an evaluation of the arguments and empirical evidence for and against conceptual metaphors, much of which scholars on both sides of the wars fail to properly acknowledge.

Navigating Life Transitions for Meaning explores the central human motivation of meaning making, and its counterpart, meaning disruption. The book describes different types of specific transitions, details how specific transitions affect an individual differently, and provides appropriate clinical approaches. The book examines the effects of life transitions on the component parts of meaning in life, including making sense (coherence), driving life goals (purpose), significance (mattering), and continuity. The book covers a range of transitions, including developmental (e.g., adolescence to adulthood), personal (e.g., illness onset, becoming a parent, and bereavement), and career (e.g., military deployment, downshifting, and retiring). Life transitions are experienced by all persons, and the influence of those transitions are tremendous. It is essential for clinicians to understand how transitions can disrupt life and how to help clients successfully navigate these changes.

Contemporary cognitive science clearly tells us that attention is modulated for speech and action. While these forms of goal-directed attention are very well researched in psychology, they have not been sufficiently studied by epistemologists. In this book, Abrol Fairweather and Carlos Montemayor develop and defend a theory of epistemic achievements that requires the manifestation of cognitive agency. They examine empirical work on the psychology of attention and assertion, and use it to ground a normative theory of epistemic achievements and virtues. The resulting study is the first sustained, naturalized virtue epistemology, and will be of interest to readers in epistemology, cognitive science, and beyond.

A guide to AI's thorniest implications that asks: How shall we navigate our brave new world? We are at a monumental turning point in human history. AI is taking intelligence in new directions. The strongest human competitors in chess, go, and Jeopardy! have been beaten by AIs, and AI is getting more sophisticated by the day. Further, AI research is going inside the human brain itself, attempting to augment human minds. It may even create greater-than-human-level intelligence, leading to a new generation of artificial minds-Minds 2.0. Susan Schneider, a philosopher, argues that these undertakings must not be attempted without a richer understanding of the nature of the mind. An insufficient grasp of the underlying philosophical issues could undermine the use of AI and brain enhancement technology, bringing about the demise or suffering of conscious beings. Examining the philosophical questions lying beneath the algorithms, Schneider takes on AI's thorniest implications.

Looking at Trauma: A Tool Kit for Clinicians is an easy-to-use, engaging resource designed to address the challenges health care professionals face in providing much-needed trauma psychoeducation to clients with histories of childhood trauma. Developed by trauma therapists Abby Hershler and Lesley Hughes in collaboration with artist Patricia Nguyen and biomedical communications specialist Shelley Wall, this book presents twelve trauma treatment models accompanied by innovative and engaging comics. The models help clinicians provide practical information about the impacts of trauma to their clients-and support those clients in understanding and managing their distressing symptoms. Topics covered include complex posttraumatic stress disorder, emotion regulation, memory, relationship patterns, and self-care. Each chapter features step-by-step instructions on how to use the treatment models with clients; practical educational tips from experienced clinicians in the field of childhood trauma; interactive trauma education comics; a foundational framework focused on care for the provider; and references for further study. Intended for use in therapeutic, clinical, and classroom settings, this book is a valuable resource for all healthcare workers. In particular, social workers, psychotherapists, spiritual care providers, nurses, occupational therapists, psychologists, primary care physicians, and psychiatrists will find this tool kit indispensable.

This book fills a longstanding need for a basic introduction to Cognitive Grammar that is current, authoritative, comprehensive, and approachable. It presents a synthesis that draws together and refines the descriptive and theoretical notions developed in this framework over the course of three decades. In a unified manner, it accommodates both the conceptual and the social-interactive basis of linguistic structure, as well as the need for both functional explanation and explicit structural description. Starting with the fundamentals, essential aspects of the theory are systematically laid out with concrete illustrations and careful discussion of their rationale. Among the topics surveyed are conceptual semantics, grammatical classes, grammatical constructions, the lexicon-grammar continuum characterized as assemblies of symbolic structures (form-meaning pairings), and the usage-based account of productivity, restrictions, and well-formedness. The theory's central claim - that grammar is inherently meaningful - is thereby shown to be viable. The framework is further elucidated through application to nominal structure, clause structure, and complex sentences. These are examined in broad perspective, with exemplification from English and numerous other languages. In line with the theory's general principles, they are discussed not only in terms of their structural characterization, but also their conceptual value and functional motivation. Other matters explored include discourse, the temporal dimension of language structure, and what grammar reveals about cognitive processes and the construction of our mental world.

How a computational framework can account for the successes and failures of human cognition At the heart of human intelligence rests a fundamental puzzle: How are we incredibly smart and stupid at the same time? No existing machine can match the power and flexibility of human perception, language, and reasoning. Yet, we routinely commit errors that reveal the failures of our thought processes. What Makes Us Smart makes sense of this paradox by arguing that our cognitive errors are not haphazard. Rather, they are the inevitable consequences of a brain optimized for efficient inference and decision making within the constraints of time, energy, and memory-in other words, data and resource limitations. Framing human intelligence in terms of these constraints, Samuel Gershman shows how a deeper computational logic underpins the "stupid" errors of human cognition. Embarking on a journey across psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and economics, Gershman presents unifying principles that govern human intelligence. First, inductive bias: any system that makes inferences based on limited data must constrain its hypotheses in some way before observing data. Second, approximation bias: any system that makes inferences and decisions with limited resources must make approximations. Applying these principles to a range of computational errors made by humans, Gershman demonstrates that intelligent systems designed to meet these constraints yield characteristically human errors. Examining how humans make intelligent and maladaptive decisions, What Makes Us Smart delves into the successes and failures of cognition.

Neuroscientific evidence has educated us in the ways in which the brain mediates our thought and behavior and, therefore, forced us to critically examine how we conceive of free will. This volume, featuring contributions from an international and interdisciplinary group of distinguished researchers and scholars, explores how our increasing knowledge of the brain can elucidate the concept of the will and whether or to what extent it is free. It also examines how brain science can inform our normative judgments of moral and criminal responsibility for our actions. Some chapters point out the different respects in which mental disorders can compromise the will and others show how different forms of neuromodulation can reveal the neural underpinning of the mental capacities associated with the will and can restore or enhance them when they are impaired.

This collaborative book by five distinguished scholars in overlapping fields suggests that fruitful living is extremely hard work and that social harmony requires the unlocking and the emancipation of the human brain - the core cerebral source for advancing human coherence, connectivity, cohesion and civility. The stakes are simply too high for stakeholders across our country not to respond to the ongoing and escalating crisis of human division and the desperate need for engagement, enlightenment, and acceptance of human diversity. The authors strongly encourage academic and practitioner psychologists, as well as other students and social scientists, to join a timely framed narrative for greater progress in diversity. Neurodiversity aims to encourage dialogue, discourse, and discovery about what may be obvious to many but avoided by most - because its forces us to look inward instead of outward. We can make such inward observations, through the lenses of psychology, cognition, mindfulness, and underleveraged brain capacity amid modern cultural neuroscience. This is critically important - particularly in a time marked by the widespread amplification of ambiguity, angst, ambivalence, and anger. This book focuses on "crucial thinking" versus "critical thinking." The authors pose fundamental questions -- about what we are calling a form of cognitive "levitation" and taxonomical "climbing" (CBDT) -- to think about purposes of intellectual discourse, not necessarily to seek empirical evidence. A special feature of this book is the inclusion of sample student learning outcomes as "provisos" throughout the narrative. We have attempted to integrate the student learning outcomes in the text's narrative and connect them to the sections where they are inserted for the reader. The book's embedded taxonomies can also facilitate the instruction, composition, and conceptualization of targeted student learning outcomes.

Hailed by the Washington Post as "a sure-footed and witty guide to slippery ethical terrain," a philosophical exploration of AI and the future of the mind that Astronomer Royal Martin Rees calls "profound and entertaining" Humans may not be Earth's most intelligent beings for much longer: the world champions of chess, Go, and Jeopardy! are now all AIs. Given the rapid pace of progress in AI, many predict that it could advance to human-level intelligence within the next several decades. From there, it could quickly outpace human intelligence. What do these developments mean for the future of the mind? In Artificial You, Susan Schneider says that it is inevitable that AI will take intelligence in new directions, but urges that it is up to us to carve out a sensible path forward. As AI technology turns inward, reshaping the brain, as well as outward, potentially creating machine minds, it is crucial to beware. Homo sapiens, as mind designers, will be playing with "tools" they do not understand how to use: the self, the mind, and consciousness. Schneider argues that an insufficient grasp of the nature of these entities could undermine the use of AI and brain enhancement technology, bringing about the demise or suffering of conscious beings. To flourish, we must grasp the philosophical issues lying beneath the algorithms. At the heart of her exploration is a sober-minded discussion of what AI can truly achieve: Can robots really be conscious? Can we merge with AI, as tech leaders like Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil suggest? Is the mind just a program? Examining these thorny issues, Schneider proposes ways we can test for machine consciousness, questions whether consciousness is an unavoidable byproduct of sophisticated intelligence, and considers the overall dangers of creating machine minds.

Contemporary cognitive science clearly tells us that attention is modulated for speech and action. While these forms of goal-directed attention are very well researched in psychology, they have not been sufficiently studied by epistemologists. In this book, Abrol Fairweather and Carlos Montemayor develop and defend a theory of epistemic achievements that requires the manifestation of cognitive agency. They examine empirical work on the psychology of attention and assertion, and use it to ground a normative theory of epistemic achievements and virtues. The resulting study is the first sustained, naturalized virtue epistemology, and will be of interest to readers in epistemology, cognitive science, and beyond.

Common sense tells us that we are morally responsible for our actions only if we have free will - and that we have free will only if we are able to choose among alternative actions. Common sense tells us that we do have free will and are morally responsible for many of the things we do. Common sense also tells us that we are objects in the natural world, governed by its laws. Nevertheless, many contemporary philosophers deny that we have free will or that free will is a necessary prerequisite for moral responsibility. Some hold that we are morally responsible only if we are somehow exempt from the laws of nature. Causes, Laws, and Free Will defends a thesis that has almost disappeared from the contemporary philosophical landscape by arguing that this philosophical flight from common sense is a mistake. We have free will even if everything we do is predictable given the laws of nature and the past, and we are morally responsible whatever the laws of nature turn out to be. The impulses that tempt us into thinking that determinism robs us of free will spring from mistakes - mistakes about the metaphysics of causation, mistakes about the nature of laws, and mistakes about the logic of counterfactuals.

Cognitive Development provides a detailed and accessible account of three main areas: theories of cognitive development, the development of measured intelligence and the development of moral understanding. The theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, Eisenburg and Bruner are discussed. The book is suitable for the AQA-A A2 level examination and students studying cognitive development for the first time at undergraduate level. The Routledge Modular Psychology series is a completely new approach to introductory level psychology, tailor-made for the new modular style of teaching. Each book covers a topic in more detail than any large text-book can, allowing teacher and student to select material exactly to suit any particular course or project. Especially written for those students new to higher-level study, whether at school. College or university, the books include the following designed features to help with technique: practise essays with specialist commentary to show how to achieve a higher grade chapter summaries and summaries of key research glossary and further reading progress and review exercises. Series editors: Cara Flanagan is a Reviser for AS and A2 level Psychology and an experienced teacher and examiner. Philip Banyard is Associate Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Nottingham Trent University and a Chief Examiner for AS and A2 level Psychology.

The cognitive foundations of geometry have puzzled academics for a long time, and even today are mostly unknown to many scholars, including mathematical cognition researchers. Foundations of Geometric Cognition shows that basic geometric skills are deeply hardwired in the visuospatial cognitive capacities of our brains, namely spatial navigation and object recognition. These capacities, shared with non-human animals and appearing in early stages of the human ontogeny, cannot, however, fully explain a uniquely human form of geometric cognition. In the book, Hohol argues that Euclidean geometry would not be possible without the human capacity to create and use abstract concepts, demonstrating how language and diagrams provide cognitive scaffolding for abstract geometric thinking, within a context of a Euclidean system of thought. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and drawing on research from diverse fields including psychology, cognitive science, and mathematics, this book is a must-read for cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists of mathematics, alongside anyone interested in mathematical education or the philosophical and historical aspects of geometry.

The cognitive foundations of geometry have puzzled academics for a long time, and even today are mostly unknown to many scholars, including mathematical cognition researchers. Foundations of Geometric Cognition shows that basic geometric skills are deeply hardwired in the visuospatial cognitive capacities of our brains, namely spatial navigation and object recognition. These capacities, shared with non-human animals and appearing in early stages of the human ontogeny, cannot, however, fully explain a uniquely human form of geometric cognition. In the book, Hohol argues that Euclidean geometry would not be possible without the human capacity to create and use abstract concepts, demonstrating how language and diagrams provide cognitive scaffolding for abstract geometric thinking, within a context of a Euclidean system of thought. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and drawing on research from diverse fields including psychology, cognitive science, and mathematics, this book is a must-read for cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists of mathematics, alongside anyone interested in mathematical education or the philosophical and historical aspects of geometry.

The hugely influential book on how the understanding of causality revolutionized science and the world, by the pioneer of artificial intelligence 'Wonderful ... illuminating and fun to read' Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winner and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow 'Correlation does not imply causation.' For decades, this mantra was invoked by scientists in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thing caused another, such as smoking and cancer, or carbon dioxide and global warming. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by world-renowned computer scientist Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed cause and effect on a firm scientific basis. Now, Pearl and science journalist Dana Mackenzie explain causal thinking to general readers for the first time, showing how it allows us to explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It is the essence of human and artificial intelligence. And just as Pearl's discoveries have enabled machines to think better, The Book of Why explains how we too can think better. 'Pearl's accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and have redefined the term "thinking machine"' Vint Cerf

'A truly awe-inspiring piece of writing' David Robson, author of The Intelligence Trap In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the question of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings in neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence have given us the necessary tools to solve its mystery. In Feeling & Knowing, Damasio elucidates the myriad aspects of consciousness and presents his analysis and new insights in a way that is faithful to our own intuitive sense of the experience. In forty-eight brief chapters, Damasio helps us understand the relation between consciousness and the mind; why being conscious is not the same as either being awake or sensing; the central role of feeling; and why the brain is essential for the development of consciousness. He synthesises the recent findings of various sciences with the philosophy of consciousness, and, most significantly, presents his original research which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behaviour. Here is an indispensable guide to understanding the fundamental human capacity for informing and transforming our experience of the world around us and our perception of our place in it.

The everyday capacity to understand the mind, or 'mindreading', plays an enormous role in our ordinary lives. Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich provide a detailed and integrated account of the intricate web of mental components underlying this fascinating and multifarious skill. The imagination, they argue, is essential to understanding others, and there are special cognitive mechanisms for understanding oneself. The account that emerges has broad implications for longstanding philosophical debates over the status of folk psychology.
Mindreading is another trailblazing volume in the prestigious interdisciplinary Oxford Cognitive Science series.

This book represents one of the cornerstones of the series Studies in Neuroscience, Psychology and Behavioral Economics. It is divided into eight sections, starting with an introduction to neuroeconomics followed by an overview of frequently applied experimental paradigms (games) in neuroeconomics research. Furthermore, it addresses the molecular basis of human decision making, environmental/situational factors and social contexts influencing human decision making, as well as translational and developmental/clinical approaches to neuroeconomics. In closing, a paper on neuro-marketing demonstrates how knowledge from neuroeconomics research can be applied in "real life." Culminating in an extensive methods section, in which eight different neuroscience techniques are introduced, the book offers an essential resource for researchers and practitioners, and may also be beneficial for graduate students.

Listening: Processes, Functions, and Competency, Second Edition explores the role of listening as an essential element in human communication. The book addresses listening as a cognitive process, as a social function, and as a critical professional competency. Blending theory with practical application, Listening builds knowledge, insight, and skill to help the reader achieve the desired outcome of effective listening. This second edition introduces listening as a goal-directed activity and has been expanded to include a new chapter addressing listening in mediated contexts. Theory and research throughout the text have been updated, and the final chapter covers new research methodologies and contexts, including fMRI, aural architecture, and music.