What is the difference between a wink and a blink? The answer is important not only to philosophers of mind, for significant moral and legal consequences rest on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior. However, "action theory" -- the branch of philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries between action and non-action, and between voluntary and involuntary behavior -- has been unable to account for the difference.

Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation -- one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be prooflike -- underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions -- as historical narrative, not inference -- follows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility.

As ideas, goods, and people move with increasing ease and speed across national boundaries and geographic distances, the economic changes and technological advances that enable this globalization are also paradoxically contributing to the balkanization of states, ethnic groups, and special interest movements. Exploring how this process is playing out in Guatemala, this book presents an innovative synthesis of the local and global factors that have led Guatemala's indigenous Maya peoples to assert and defend their cultural identity and distinctiveness within the dominant Hispanic society.

Drawing on recent theories from cognitive studies, interpretive ethnography, and political economy, Edward F. Fischer looks at individual Maya activists and local cultures, as well as changing national and international power relations, to understand how ethnic identities are constructed and expressed in the modern world. At the global level, he shows how structural shifts in international relations have opened new venues of ethnic expression for Guatemala's majority Maya population. At the local level, he examines the processes of identity construction in two Kaqchikel Maya towns, Tecpan and Patzun, and shows how divergent local norms result in different conceptions and expressions of Maya-ness, which nonetheless share certain fundamental similarities with the larger pan-Maya project. Tying these levels of analysis together, Fischer argues that open-ended Maya "cultural logics" condition the ways in which Maya individuals (national leaders and rural masses alike) creatively express their identity in a rapidly changing world.

More than ever, clinicians need customizable approaches for treating children with mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression. Written by an experienced educational psychologist, ACT for Treating Children offers clear, practical, brief, and developmentally appropriate strategies grounded in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to help children ages 5 to 12 learn effective coping skills, manage emotions, and bounce back from life's difficulties. A brief 6-10 session protocol. Clear, practical, and developmentally appropriate strategies to help children ages 5 to 12 learn effective coping skills, manage emotions, and bounce back from life's difficulties.If you treat children struggling with mental health conditions such as depression or anxiety, you know that approaches designed for adults do not work with younger clients. ACT for Treating Children presents skills grounded in evidence-based acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to help children regulate emotions and cope with the inevitable ups and downs of life, and is suitable for clinicians with no prior knowledge of or training in ACT, as well as seasoned ACT clinicians. Written by an experienced educational and developmental psychologist, this practical clinician's guide outlines a simplified version of the ACT Hexaflex-a key component of this treatment model-called the Kidflex, to help young clients build resilience and psychological flexibility. You'll also find detailed case studies, transcripts, activities, experiential exercises, worksheets, and session plans to help you develop the skillset you need to help children overcome disorders such as stress, anxiety and depression. Finally, you'll find strategies for involving parents in treatment when appropriate, and enlisting them as 'ACT coaches' in the child's therapy.It can be difficult to know where to start when using ACT for individual therapy with children. That's why the skills in this go-to guide are practical and easy-to-implement, can be done with children in both face-to-face therapy and online sessions, and are simple enough for children to put into practice in any setting-whether it's at home, in school, or out in the world.

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart invites readers to embark on a new journey into a land of rationality that differs from the familiar territory of cognitive science and economics. Traditional views of rationality tend to see decision makers as possessing superhuman powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and all of eternity in which to ponder choices. To understand decisions in the real world, we need a different, more psychologically plausible notion of rationality, and this book provides it. It is about fast and frugal heuristics--simple rules for making decisions when time is pressing and deep thought an unaffordable luxury. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality. But when and how can such fast and frugal heuristics work? Can judgments based simply on one good reason be as accurate as those based on many reasons? Could less knowledge even lead to systematically better predictions than more knowledge? Simple Heuristics explores these questions, developing computational models of heuristics and testing them through experiments and analyses. It shows how fast and frugal heuristics can produce adaptive decisions in situations as varied as choosing a mate, dividing resources among offspring, predicting high school drop out rates, and playing the stock market. As an interdisciplinary work that is both useful and engaging, this book will appeal to a wide audience. It is ideal for researchers in cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science, as well as in economics and artificial intelligence. It will also inspire anyone interested in simply making good decisions.

Jerome Bruner is one of the grand figures of psychology. From his role as a founder of the cognitive revolution in the 1950s to his recent advocacy of cultural psychology, Bruner's influence has been dramatic and far-reaching. Such is the breadth of his vision that Bruner's work has inspired thinkers in many of the major areas of psychology and has had a powerful impact on adjacent disciplines. His writings on language acquisition, culture and education are of profound and enduring importance. Focusing on the dominant themes of language, culture and self, this volume provides a comprehensive exploration of Bruner's fertile ideas and a considered appraisal of his legacy.

With a distinguished list of contributors including Jerome Bruner himself, the result is an outstanding volume of interest to students and scholars in psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, and education.

Among the contributors are Judy Dunn, Howard Gardner, Clifford Geertz, Rom Harré, David Olson, Edward Reed, Talbot Taylor, Michael Tomasello, and John Shotter. The volume is framed by an editorial introduction that considers the distinctively philosophical dimensions of Bruner's thought, and a final chapter by Bruner himself in which he re-examines prominent themes in his work in light of issues raised by the contributors.

The volume will be invaluable to students and researchers in the fields of psychology, cognitive science, education, and the philosophy of mind.

In this Monograph, knowledge acquisition is examined as a process involving the coordination of existing theories with new evidence. Central to the present work is the claim that strategies of knowledge acquisition may vary significantly across (as well as within) individuals and can be conceptualized within a developmental framework.

Previous experimental research has suggested that chimpanzees may understand some of the epitemological aspects of visual perception, such as how the perceptual act of seeing can have internal mental consequences for an individual's state of knowledge. Other research suggests that chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates may understand visual perception at a simpler level; that is, they may at least understand seeing as a mental event that subjectively anchors organisms to the external world. However, these results are ambiguous and are open to several interpretations. In this Monograph, we report the results of 15 studies that were conducted with chimpanzees and preschool children to explore their knowledge about visual perception.

This Monograph presents a theory of cognitive development. The theory argues that the mind develops across three fronts. The first refers to a general processing system that defines the general potentials of mind to develop cognitive strategies and skills. The second refers to a hypercognitive system that governs self-understanding and self-regulation. The third involves a set of specialized structural systems that are responsible for the representation and processing of different reality domains.

This is a valuable book for supervisory level personnel who can establish policy and who will be in a position to influence others who work directly with the persons with special needs. "Contemporary Psychology"

Far too often behavioral principles--sound enough in themselves--are applied without taking individual needs and tastes into account. Such programs either fail to change the behavior or they draw counselor and patient--teacher and student--parent and child into deeper conflict. "Cognitive Counseling and Persons with Special NeedS" describes the effective and humane use of behavioral methods to teach social and cognitive skills to the severely and profoundly mentally retarded. This introduction and guidebook outlines general principles and offers many case studies to illustrate the concepts under discussion.

Combing cutting edge science and educational philosophy, The Wisdom of the Body offers practical, effective advice for anyone interested in how humans learn and think. With compelling arguments in favor of an embodied approach to school, Shonstrom illuminates the power of learning through physical, sensory experiences, and challenges traditional approaches in education by offering dynamic, ground-breaking examples of how an embodied pedagogy could revolutionize learning.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in cognition within sociology and other social sciences. Within sociology this interest cuts across various topical subfields, including culture, social psychology, religion, race, and identity. Scholars within the new subfield of cognitive sociology, also referred to as the sociology of culture and cognition, are contributing to a rapidly developing body of work on how mental and social phenomena are interrelated and often interdependent. In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, Wayne H. Brekhus and Gabe Igantow have gathered some of the most influential scholars working in cognitive sociology to present an accessible introduction to key research areas in a diverse field. While classical sociological and newer interdisciplinary approaches have been covered separately by scholars in the past, this volume alternatively presents a broad range of cognitive sociological perspectives. The contributors discuss a range of approaches for theorizing and analyzing the "social mind," including macro-cultural approaches, interactionist approaches, and research that draws on Pierre Bourdieu's major concepts. Each chapter further investigates a variety of cognitive processes within these three approaches, such as attention and inattention, perception, automatic and deliberate cognition, cognition and social action, stereotypes, categorization, classification, judgment, symbolic boundaries, meaning-making, metaphor, embodied cognition, morality and religion, identity construction, time sequencing, and memory. A comprehensive look at cognitive sociology's main contributions and the central debates within the field, the Handbook will serve as a primary resource for social researchers, faculty, and students interested in how cognitive sociology can contribute to research within their substantive areas of focus.

A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology offers a comprehensive overview of the development of cognitive anthropology from its inception to the present day and presents recent findings in the areas of theory, methodology, and field research in twenty-nine key essays by leading scholars. * Demonstrates the importance of cognitive anthropology as an early constituent of the cognitive sciences * Examines how culturally shared and complex cognitive systems work, how they are structured, how they differ from one culture to another, how they are learned and passed on * Explains how cultural (or collective) vs. individual knowledge distinguishes cognitive anthropology from cognitive psychology * Examines recent theories and methods for studying cognition in real-world scenarios * Contains twenty-nine key essays by leading names in the field

To speak of 'thinking with literature' is to make the assumption that literature (in the broadest sense) is neither a side-show nor a side-issue in human cultures: it belongs to the spectrum of imaginative modes that includes both philosophical and scientific thought. Whether one regards it as a practice or as an archive, literature is highly pervasive, robust, enduring, and pregnant with values. Thinking with Literature argues that what it affords above all is a way of thinking, whether for writer, reader, or critic. Literature constitutes one of the prime instruments of cultural improvisation; it is the embodiment of a powerful, inventive, and ever-changing cognitive agency. As such, it invites a cognitive mode of criticism, one which asserts the priority of the individual literary work as a unique product of human cognition. In this book, discussions of topics, arguments, and hypotheses from the cognitive sciences, philosophy, and the theory of communication are woven into the fabric of a critical analysis which insists on the value of close reading: a poem by Yeats, a scene from Shakespeare, novels by Mme de Lafayette, Conrad, Frantzen, stories from Winnie-the-Pooh and many others appear here on their own terms, with their own cognitive energies. Written in an accessible style, Thinking with Literature speaks both to mainstream readers of literature and to specialists in cognitive studies.

4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) is a relatively young and thriving field of interdisciplinary research. It assumes that cognition is shaped and structured by dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and both the physical and social environments. With essays from leading scholars and researchers, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition investigates this recent paradigm. It addresses the central issues of embodied cognition by focusing on recent trends, such as Bayesian inference and predictive coding, and presenting new insights, such as the development of false belief understanding. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition also introduces new theoretical paradigms for understanding emotion and conceptualizing the interactions between cognition, language, and culture. With an entire section dedicated to the application of 4E cognition in disciplines such as psychiatry and robotics, and critical notes aimed at stimulating discussion, this Oxford handbook is the definitive guide to 4E cognition. Aimed at neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and philosophers, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in this young and thriving field.

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

Whenever you get dressed, carry objects, write, draw, or gesture, you express knowledge about how to get things done with your hands. Ironically, that knowledge is often difficult to express. Typically you can't say what you know. Still, it would be enormously useful to identify the knowledge underlying manual control. The design of equipment and transportation systems might better anticipate the abilities and limitations of users, and methods of teaching and rehabilitating skills might improve. This book, the first on the cognitive psychology of manual control, uncovers the hidden knowledge that hands express. Organized around key topics in this emerging area, including the role of the will in manual control, illusions concerning hand position sense, and the coordination of manual actions with others, Knowing Hands explains the planning and control of manual actions in everyday life.

The topic of the reduction of mental processes to biophysical mechanisms touches at the core of the mind body problem, a puzzle in the philosophy of mind since the days of Descartes. This book is about philosophical aspects of neuroscience, centred on perspective dualism. The topic unfolds in the discussion of mechanisms in world and mind. Neuronal mechanisms of differing complexity are described in a general way. It is shown how models of such mechanisms may be classified and assigned to levels of systems theory. Reduction strategies are applied to processes of life, mind, and consciousness. The aim is physicalistic, to explore if and how the mental may be understood in terms of biophysics and its mechanisms."

A foremost scholar in comparative cognition--a discipline closely connected to behavioral biology, evolution, and cognitive neuroscience--author Sara J. Shettleworth delivers a focused treatment of the essentials in writing that is both lucid and captivating.
Brief, yet brimming with detail, Fundamentals of Comparative Cognition conveys the richness and complexity of this diverse field while addressing two fundamental questions: "What makes us uniquely human?" and "What do our minds share with other creatures?"

The Third Edition of this popular text continues its in-depth, practical coverage with a focus on learning and instruction that presents the latest psychological and educational models and research to the students of today's learning society. Psychology of Learning for Instruction, Third Edition, focuses on the applications and implications of the learning theories. Using excellent examples ranging from primary school instruction to corporate training, this text combines the latest thinking and research to give students the opportunity to explore the individual theories as viewed by the experts. Students are encouraged to apply "reflective practice," which is designed to foster a critical and reflective mode of thinking when considering any particular approach to learning and instruction.

In this open access book, Carlos Montemayor illuminates the development of artificial intelligence (AI) by examining our drive to live a dignified life. He uses the notions of agency and attention to consider our pursuit of what is important. His method shows how the best way to guarantee value alignment between humans and potentially intelligent machines is through attention routines that satisfy similar needs. Setting out a theoretical framework for AI Montemayor acknowledges its legal, moral, and political implications and takes into account how epistemic agency differs from moral agency. Through his insightful comparisons between human and animal intelligence, Montemayor makes it clear why adopting a need-based attention approach justifies a humanitarian framework. This is an urgent, timely argument for developing AI technologies based on international human rights agreements. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Carlos Montemayor and San Francisco State University.

Since the publication of the first edition of "Computers as Cognitive Tools" in 1993, rapid changes have taken place in the uses of technology for educational purposes and in the theories underlying such uses. Changes in perspectives on thinking and learning are guiding the instructional design of computer-based learning environments.
"Computers as Cognitive Tools, Volume II: No More Walls" provides examples of state-of-the-art technology-based research in the field of education and training. These examples are theory-driven and reflect the learning paradigms that are currently in use in cognitive science. The learning theories, which consider the nature of individual learning, as well as how knowledge is constructed in social situations, include information processing, constructivism, and situativity. Contributors to this volume demonstrate some variability in their choice of guiding learning paradigms. This allows readers the opportunity to examine how such paradigms are operationalized and validated.
An array of instructional and assessment approaches are described, along with new techniques for automating the design and assessment process. New considerations are offered as possibilities for examining learning in distributed situations. A multitude of subject matter areas are covered, including scientific reasoning and inquiry in biology, physics, medicine, electricity, teacher education, programming, and hypermedia composition in the social sciences and ecology.
This volume reconsiders the initial camp analogy posited in 1993 edition of "Computers as Cognitive Tools," and presents a mechanism for breaking camp to find new summits.

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD "Aguirre writes clearly, concisely, and often cinematically. The book succeeds in providing an accessible yet substantive look at memory science and offering glimpses of the often-challenging process of biomedical investigation."-Science Sometimes, it's not the discovery that's hard - it's convincing others that you're right. The Memory Thief chronicles an investigation into a rare and devastating amnesia first identified in a cluster of fentanyl overdose survivors. When a handful of doctors embark on a quest to find out exactly what happened to these marginalized victims, they encounter indifference and skepticism from the medical establishment. But after many blind alleys and occasional strokes of good luck, they go on to prove that opioids can damage the hippocampus, a tiny brain region responsible for forming new memories. This discovery may have implications for millions of people around the world. Through the prism of this fascinating story, Aguirre recounts the obstacles researchers so often confront when new ideas bump up against conventional wisdom. She explains the elegant tricks scientists use to tease out the fundamental mechanisms of memory. And finally, she reveals why researchers now believe that a treatment for Alzheimer's is within reach.

What artificial intelligence can tell us about the mind and intelligent behavior. What can artificial intelligence teach us about the mind? If AI's underlying concept is that thinking is a computational process, then how can computation illuminate thinking? It's a timely question. AI is all the rage, and the buzziest AI buzz surrounds adaptive machine learning: computer systems that learn intelligent behavior from massive amounts of data. This is what powers a driverless car, for example. In this book, Hector Levesque shifts the conversation to "good old fashioned artificial intelligence," which is based not on heaps of data but on understanding commonsense intelligence. This kind of artificial intelligence is equipped to handle situations that depart from previous patterns-as we do in real life, when, for example, we encounter a washed-out bridge or when the barista informs us there's no more soy milk. Levesque considers the role of language in learning. He argues that a computer program that passes the famous Turing Test could be a mindless zombie, and he proposes another way to test for intelligence-the Winograd Schema Test, developed by Levesque and his colleagues. "If our goal is to understand intelligent behavior, we had better understand the difference between making it and faking it," he observes. He identifies a possible mechanism behind common sense and the capacity to call on background knowledge: the ability to represent objects of thought symbolically. As AI migrates more and more into everyday life, we should worry if systems without common sense are making decisions where common sense is needed.

"Character" has become a front-and-center topic in contemporary discourse, but this term does not have a fixed meaning. Character may be simply defined by what someone does not do, but a more active and thorough definition is necessary, one that addresses certain vital questions. Is character a singular characteristic of an individual, or is it composed of different aspects? Does character--however we define it--exist in degrees, or is it simply something one happens to have? How can character be developed? Can it be learned? Relatedly, can it be taught, and who might be the most effective teacher? What roles are played by family, schools, the media, religion, and the larger culture? This groundbreaking handbook of character strengths and virtues is the first progress report from a prestigious group of researchers who have undertaken the systematic classification and measurement of widely valued positive traits. They approach good character in terms of separate strengths-authenticity, persistence, kindness, gratitude, hope, humor, and so on-each of which exists in degrees.
Character Strengths and Virtues classifies twenty-four specific strengths under six broad virtues that consistently emerge across history and culture: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Each strength is thoroughly examined in its own chapter, with special attention to its meaning, explanation, measurement, causes, correlates, consequences, and development across the life span, as well as to strategies for its deliberate cultivation. This book demands the attention of anyone interested in psychology and what it can teach about the good life.

The empirical and theoretical analysis of executive control processes, dormant for many years, has grown to become one of the most fertile areas of research in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Because executive functions are thought to have a pervasive role in maintaining optimal information processing across many processing situations, issues related to executive control cut across many traditional research divides. Unique among many other areas of research in cognition, questions about the influence of ageing have figured prominently in executive control research. There is accumulating evidence of age-related changes in frontal/executive functions. The union of research on executive functioning with research on the cognitive effects of ageing could provide the theoretical framework for understanding the widespread influence of ageing on cognition.
This special issue brings together well-known researchers in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience who approach the question of executive control using a wide range of methods from traditional behavioural studies, quantitative and computational modelling, and functional neuroimaging. The emphasis of these contributions is on a concise overview and integration of relevant theoretical ideas and empirical findings. By bringing together a diverse group of contributors, this special issue can serve researchers and students both as a summary of current research and as a starting point toward further explorations on the relations between executive control and the cognitive influences of ageing.

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