A recurrent issue in linguistic theory and psychology concerns the cognitive status of memorized lists and their internal structure. In morphological theory, the collections of inflected forms of a given noun, verb, or adjective into inflectional paradigms are thought to constitute one such type of list. This book focuses on the question of which elements in a paradigm can stand in a relation of partial or total phonological identity. Leading scholars consider inflectional identity from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with an emphasis on both case studies and predictive theories of where syncretism and other "paradigmatic pressures" will occur in natural language. The authors consider phenomena such as allomorphy and syncretism while exploring questions of underlying representations, the formal properties of markedness, and the featural representation of conjugation and declension classes. They do so from the perspective of contemporary theories of morphology and phonology, including Distributed Morphology and Optimality Theory, and in the context of a wide range of languages, among them Amharic, Greek, Romanian, Russian, Saami, and Yiddish. The subjects addressed in the book include the role of featural decomposition of morphosyntactic features, the status of paradigms as the unit of syncretism, asymmetric effects in identity-dependence, and the selection of a base-of-derivation.
The Bases of Inflectional Identity will interest linguists and cognitive scientists, especially students and scholars of phonological theory and the phonology-morphology and mind-language interfaces at graduate level and above.

This is the first comprehensive account of the segmental phonology of Hungarian in English. Part I introduces the general features of the language. Part II examines its vowel and consonant systems, and its phonotactics (syllable structure constraints, transsyllabic constraints, and morpheme structure constraints). Part III describes the phonological processes that vowels, consonants, and syllables undergo and/or trigger. The authors provide a new analysis of vowel harmony as well as discussions of vowel length alternations, palatalization, voice assimilation, and processes targeting nasals and liquids. The final chapters cover processes conditioned by syllable structure, and briefly describe a selection of surface phenomena.
This authoritative account of the sound pattern of this unique language will interest phonologists and advanced students throughout the world.

This is the first exhaustive investigation of gradience in syntax, conceived of as grammatical indeterminacy. It looks at gradience in English word classes, phrases, clauses and constructions, and examines how it may be defined and differentiated. Professor Aarts addresses the tension between linguistic concepts and the continuous phenomena they describe by testing and categorizing grammatical vagueness and indeterminacy. He considers to what extent gradience is a grammatical phenomenon or a by-product of imperfect linguistic description, and makes a series of linked proposals for its theoretical formalization.
Bas Aarts draws on, and reviews, work in psychology, philosophy and language from Aristotle to Chomsky., and writes clearly on a fascinating and important aspect of language and cognition. His book will appeal to scholars and graduate students of language and syntactic theory in departments of (English) linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science.

A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of the Year A Guardian "Best Book about Ideas" of the Year No one likes to be bored. Two leading psychologists explain what causes boredom and how to listen to what it is telling you, so you can live a more engaged life. We avoid boredom at all costs. It makes us feel restless and agitated. Desperate for something to do, we play games on our phones, retie our shoes, or even count ceiling tiles. And if we escape it this time, eventually it will strike again. But what if we listened to boredom instead of banishing it? Psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood contend that boredom isn't bad for us. It's just that we do a bad job of heeding its guidance. When we're bored, our minds are telling us that whatever we are doing isn't working-we're failing to satisfy our basic psychological need to be engaged and effective. Too many of us respond poorly. We become prone to accidents, risky activities, loneliness, and ennui, and we waste ever more time on technological distractions. But, Danckert and Eastwood argue, we can let boredom have the opposite effect, motivating the change we need. The latest research suggests that an adaptive approach to boredom will help us avoid its troubling effects and, through its reminder to become aware and involved, might lead us to live fuller lives. Out of My Skull combines scientific findings with everyday observations to explain an experience we'd like to ignore, but from which we have a lot to learn. Boredom evolved to help us. It's time we gave it a chance.

Aesthetics has long been the preserve of philosophy, art history, and the creative arts but, more recently, the fields of psychology and neuroscience have entered the discussion, and the field of neuroaesthetics has been born. In Brain, Beauty, and Art, leading scholars in this nascent field reflect on the promise of neuroaesthetics to enrich our understanding of this universal yet diverse facet of human experience. The volume consists of essays from foundational researchers whose empirical work launched the field. Each essay is anchored to an original, peer-reviewed paper from the short history of this new and burgeoning subdiscipline of cognitive neuroscience. Authors of each essay were asked three questions: 1) What motivated the original paper? 2) What were the main findings or theoretical claims made? and, 3) How do those findings or claims fit with the current state and anticipated near future of neuroaesthetics? Together, these essays establish the territory and current boundaries of neuroaesthetics and identify its most promising future directions. Topics include models of neuroaesthetics, and discussions of beauty, art, dance, music, literature, and architecture. Brain, Beauty, and Art will inform and stimulate anyone with an abiding interest in why it is that, across time and culture, we respond to beauty, engage with art, and are affected by music and architecture.

Teleosemantics seeks to explain meaning and other intentional phenomena in terms of their function in the life of the species. This volume of new essays from an impressive line-up of well-known contributors offers a valuable summary of the current state of the teleosemantics debate.

Nietzsche is perhaps best known for his diagnosis of the problem of nihilism. Though his elaborations on this diagnosis often include descriptions of certain beliefs characteristic of the nihilist (such as beliefs in the meaninglessness or worthlessness of existence), he just as frequently specifies a variety of affective symptoms experienced by the nihilist that weaken their will and diminish their agency. This affective dimension to nihilism, however, remains drastically underexplored. In this book, Kaitlyn Creasy offers a comprehensive account of affective nihilism that draws on Nietzsche's drive psychology, especially his reflections on affects and their transformative potential. After exploring Nietzsche's account of affectivity (illuminating especially the transpersonal nature of affect in Nietzsche's thought) and the phenomenon of affective nihilism, Creasy argues that affective nihilism might be overcome by employing a variety of Nietzschean strategies: experimentation, self-narration, and self-genealogy.

Emily Dickinson's Poetic Art is both an exciting work of literary criticism on a central figure in American literature as well as an invitation for students and researchers to engage with cognitive literary studies. Emily Dickinson's poetry can be challenging and difficult. It paradoxically gives readers a feeling of closeness and intimacy while being puzzling and obscure. Critical interpretations of Dickinson's poems tend to focus on what they mean rather than on what kind of experience they create. A cognitive approach to literary criticism, based on recent cognitive research, helps readers experience and understand the hows and whys of what a poem is saying and doing. These include cognitive linguistic analysis, versification, prosody, cognitive metaphor, schema, blending, and iconicity, all of which explain the sensory, motor, and emotive processes that motivate Dickinson's conceptualizations. By experiencing Dickinson's poetry from a cognitive perspective, readers are able to better understand why we feel so close to the poet and why her poetry endures. Emily Dickinson's Poetic Art: A Cognitive Reading is an important contribution to the study of a major American poet as well as to the vibrant field of cognitive literary studies.

In this important and pioneering book Frederick Newmeyer takes on the question of language variety. He considers why some language types are impossible and why some grammatical features are more common than others. The task of trying to explain typological variation among languages has been mainly undertaken by functionally-oriented linguists. Generative grammarians entering the field of typology in the 1980s put forward the idea that cross-linguistic differences could be explained by linguistic parameters within Universal Grammar, whose operation might vary from language to language. Unfortunately, this way of looking at variation turned out to be much less successful than had been hoped for. Professor Newmeyer's alternative to parameters combines leading ideas from functionalist and formalist approaches which in the past have been considered incompatible. He throws fresh light on language typology and variation, and provides new insights into the principles of Universal Grammar. The book is written in a clear, readable style and will be readily understood by anyone with a couple of years' study of linguistics. It will interest a wide range of scholars and students of language, including typologists, historical linguists, and theorists of every shade.

In this important and pioneering book Frederick Newmeyer takes on the question of language variety. He considers why some language types are impossible and why some grammatical features are more common than others. The task of trying to explain typological variation among languages has been mainly undertaken by functionally-oriented linguists. Generative grammarians entering the field of typology in the 1980s put forward the idea that cross-linguistic differences could be explained by linguistic parameters within Universal Grammar, whose operation might vary from language to language. Unfortunately, this way of looking at variation turned out to be much less successful than had been hoped for. Professor Newmeyer's alternative to parameters combines leading ideas from functionalist and formalist approaches which in the past have been considered incompatible. He throws fresh light on language typology and variation, and provides new insights into the principles of Universal The book is written in a clear, readable style and will be readily understood by anyone with a couple of years' study of linguistics. It will interest a wide range of scholars and students of language, including typologists, historical linguists, and theorists of every shade.

This cutting-edge book offers a theoretical account of the evolution of multiple memory systems of the brain. The authors conceptualize these memory systems from both behavioural and neurobiological perspectives, guided by three related principles. First, that our understanding of a wide range of memory phenomena can be advanced by breaking down memory into multiple forms with different operating characteristics. Second, that different forms of memory representation are supported by distinct brain pathways with circuitry and neural coding properties. Third, that the contributions of different brain systems can be compared and contrasted by distinguishing between dedicated (or specific) and elaborate (or general) memory systems. A primary goal of this work is to relate the neurobiological properties of dedicated and elaborate systems to their neuropsychological counterparts, and in so doing, account for the phenomenology of memory, from conditioning to conscious recollection.

The notions of 'function', 'feature' and 'functional feature' are associated with relatively new developments and insights in several areas of cognition. This book brings together different definitions, insights and research related to defining these notions from such diverse areas as language, perception, categorization and development. Each of the contributors in this book explicitly defines the notion of 'function', 'feature' or 'functional feature' within their own theoretical framework, presents research in which such a notion plays a pivotal role, and discusses the contribution of functional features in relation to their insights in a particular area of cognition. As such, this book not only presents new developments devoted to defining 'function', 'feature' and 'functional feature' in several sub-disciplines of cognitive science, but also offers a focused account of how these notions operate within the cognitive interface linking language and spatial representation. All book chapters are accessible for the interested novice, and offer the specialized researcher new empirical and theoretical insights into defining function, both with respect to the language and space interface and across cognition. The introduction to the book presents the reader with the main issues and viewpoints that are discussed in more detail in each of the book chapters.

A radical exploration of how rituals have influenced history over thousands of years. From infancy, we copy those around us in order to be like others, to be one with the tribe. Other primates will copy behaviour that leads to transparent benefits, such as access to food, but only humans promiscuously copy actions that have no obvious instrumental purpose. The copying of causally opaque behaviour (rituals) has allowed cultural groups to proliferate over time and space. The frequency and emotional intensity of ritual performances constrains the scale and structure of cultural groups. Rare, traumatic rituals (e.g. painful initiations) produce very strong social cohesion in small, relational groups such as military battalions or local cults whereas daily and weekly rituals (e.g. collective praying in mosques, churches, and synagogues) produce diffuse cohesion in indefinitely expandable communities. This pioneering study presents a theory of how these two 'ritual modes' have influenced the course of human history over many thousands of years and continue to shape the groups we live in today. The resulting programme of research offers a radically new paradigm for the social sciences, one that bridges across disciplinary silos, samples the full diversity of the world's populations, and plumbs our richest sources of information about cultural systems, past and present. In doing so, leading anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse shows how we can modify the way we tackle some of the most pressing challenges of our day, from violent extremism to global heating. All the problems humanity creates are ultimately problems of cooperation. Solving these problems will require social glue. Whitehouse suggests various practical ways in which our growing knowledge about the role of ritual in group bonding can help us achieve a more peaceful and prosperous future, not only for ourselves but for all species who share the planet with us.

How do brains make minds? Paul Thagard presents a unified, brain-based theory of cognition and emotion with applications to the most complex kinds of thinking, right up to consciousness and creativity. Neural mechanisms are used to explain mental operations for analogy, action, intention, language, and the self. Brain-Mind develops a brilliant account of mental operations using promising new ideas from theoretical neuroscience. Single neurons cannot do much by themselves, but groups of neurons work together to accomplish powerful kinds of mental representation, including concepts, images, and rules. Minds enable people to perceive, imagine, solve problems, understand, learn, speak, reason, create, and be emotional and conscious. Competing explanations of how the mind works have identified it as soul, computer, brain, dynamical system, or social construction. This book explains minds in terms of interacting mechanisms operating at multiple levels, including the social, mental, neural, and molecular. Unification comes from systematic application of Chris Eliasmith's powerful Semantic Pointer Architecture, a highly original synthesis of neural network and symbolic ideas about how the mind works. This book belongs to a trio that includes Mind-Society: From Brains to Social Sciences and Professions and Natural Philosophy: From Social Brains to Knowledge, Reality, Morality, and Beauty. They can be read independently, but together they make up a Treatise on Mind and Society that provides a unified and comprehensive treatment of the cognitive sciences, social sciences, professions, and humanities.

More than one third of the human brain is devoted to the processes of seeing - vision is after all the main way in which we gather information about the world. But human vision is a dynamic process during which the eyes continually sample the environment. Where most books on vision consider it as a passive activity, this book is unique in focusing on vision as an 'active' process. It goes beyond most accounts of vision where the focus is on seeing, to provide an integrated account of seeing AND looking.

The book starts by pointing out the weaknesses in our traditional approaches to vision and the reason we need this new approach. It then gives a thorough description of basic details of the visual and oculomotor systems necessary to understand active vision. The book goes on to show how this approach can give a new perspective on visual attention, and how the approach has progressed in the areas of visual orienting, reading, visual search, scene perception and neuropsychology. Finally, the book summarises progress by showing how this approach sheds new light on the old problem of how we maintain perception of a stable visual world.

Written by two leading vision scientists, this book will be valuable for vision researchers and psychology students, from undergraduate level upwards.

Leading philosophers and psychologists join forces to investigate a set of problems to do with agency and self-awareness, in eighteen specially written essays. In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sciences and consciousness.

It is a simple observation that children make mistakes when they learn a language. Yet, to the trained eye, these mistakes are far from random; in fact, they closely resemble perfectly grammatical utterances by adults - who speak other languages. This type of error analysis suggests a novel view of language learning: children are born with a fixed set of hypotheses about language - Chomsky's Universal Grammar - and these hypotheses compete to match the child's ambient language in a Darwinian fashion. The book presents evidence for this perspective from the study of children's words and grammar, and how language changes over time.

The recent rise of multimedia technology has turned visual communication into an everyday reality and made it necessary to achieve a better understanding of the role of diagrams and sketches in communication and in creative thought and problem-solving.Diagrammatic Representation and Reasoning is a wide-ranging, multidisciplinary overview of this area, covering relevant research in computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and psychology.Key topics include:- Cognitive aspects of diagrammatic information;- Formal methods for computing with diagrams;- Applications of advanced diagrammatic systems.This book is a state-of-the-art survey that will be a valuable resource for researchers and students in the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and graphics and visualisation.

Software Design - Cognitive Aspects covers a variety of areas including software analysis, design, coding and maintenance. It details the history of the research that has been conducted since the 1970s in this fast-developing field before defining a computer program from a computing and cognitive psychology viewpoint. Detailed treatment is given to the two essential sides of programming; software production and software understanding and throughout the book parallels are drawn between studies on processing texts written in natural language and processing computer programs.This book will be of particular interest to researchers, practitioners and graduate students in Computer Science, Cognitive Psychology, and Cognitive Ergonomics.

Reason and Nature investigates the norms of reason--the standards which contribute to determining whether beliefs, inferences, and actions are rational. Nine philosophers and two psychologists discuss what kinds of things these norms are, how they can be situated within the natural world, and what role they play in the psychological explanation of belief and action. Current work in the theory of rationality is subject to very diverse influences ranging from experimental and theoretical psychology, through philosophy of logic and language, to metaethics and the theory of practical reasoning; this range is well represented here.

Connectionist Models of Learning, Development and Evolution comprises a selection of papers presented at the Sixth Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop - the only international workshop devoted to connectionist models of psychological phenomena.With a main theme of neural network modelling in the areas of evolution, learning, and development, the papers are organized into six sections:The neural basis of cognitionDevelopment and category learningImplicit learningSocial cognition EvolutionSemanticsCovering artificial intelligence, mathematics, psychology, neurobiology, and philosophy, it will be an invaluable reference work for researchers and students working on connectionist modelling in computer science and psychology, or in any area related to cognitive science.

John Campbell investigates how consciousness of the world explains our ability to think about the world. So your ability to think about objects you can see depends on your capacity for conscious visual attention to those things. Reference and Consciousness illuminates classical problems about thought, reference, and experience by looking at the underlying psychological mechanisms on which conscious attention depends. It is an original and stimulating contribution to philosophy and to cognitive science.

What explains our ability to refer to the objects we perceive? John Cambell argues that our capacity for reference is explained by our capacity to attend selectively to the objects of which we are aware; that this capacity for conscious attention to a perceived object is what provides us with our knowledge of reference. When someone makes a reference to a perceived object, your knowledge of which thing they are talking about is constituted by your consciously attending to the relevant object. Campbell articulates the connections between these three concepts: reference, attention, and consciousness. He looks at the metaphysical conception of the environment demanded by such an account, and at the demands imposed on our conception of consciousness by the point that consciousness of objects is what explains our capacity to think about them. He argues that empirical work on the binding problem can illuminate our grasp of the way in which we have knowledge of reference, supplied by conscious attention to the relevant object.
Reference and Consciousness illuminates fundamental problems about thought, reference, and experience by looking at the underlying psychological mechanisms on which conscious attention depends. It is an original and stimulating contribution to philosophy and cognitive science.

This book provides both a review of the literature and a theoretical framework for understanding the development of visual attention from infancy through early childhood. Taking a functional approach to the topic, the authors discuss the development of the selective and state-related aspects of attention, as well as the emergence of higher-level controls. They also explore the individual differences in these facets of attention, and consider the possible origins of early deficits in attention, which has obvious implications for children with developmental disorders such as attention-deficit hyperactive disorder. These findings will be invaluable to developmental, cognitive, and clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.

This is the first comprehensive account of the phonology of Hungarian to have been published in English. Hungarian is a Uralic (Finno-Ugric) language. It is unlike other European languages, and atypical among the members of the Uralic family. The lexicon reflects the country's history, with the earliest layers of loanwords coming from Iranian, various Turkic and Slavonic languages, and German. The book is divided into three parts. Part I introduces the general features of the language and its major dialects. Part II examines its vowel and consonant systems, and its phonotactics (syllable structure constraints, transsyllabic constraints, and morpheme structure constraints). In Part III the authors describe the phonological processes that vowels, consonants, and syllables undergo and/or trigger. They provide a new analysis of vowel harmony, as well as discussions of palatalization, voice assimilation, and processes targetting nasals and liquids. The final chapters of the work are devoted to processes conditioned by syllable structure, and to surface phenomena. The book concludes with a full list of references and a comprehensive index. The authors have framed their discussions within a rule-based, non-linear framework to achieve optimum accessibility and concision. Their authoritative account of the sound-system of this unique language will interest phonologists and their advanced students throughout the world.