Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary series bringing together topics of interest to psychologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and linguists. Each volume is based on conferences organized at Simon Fraser University, with chapters added from nonparticipants to ensure balanced and adequate coverage from the topic under study. The fifth volume examines the role of perception in cognitive psychology in light of recent events. Despite the wide scope of the intended topic, however, papers presented at the conference and solicited for this text all focus on fundamental questions about the nature of visual perception, specifically concerning the form and content of visual representations.

We are approaching the end of the first century of attempts to discover how the brain enables us to acquire, retain, and use information based on experience. The past several decades especially have witnessed an ever accelerating pace of research. This increase is due in large part to the development of new techniques for the analysis of brain and behavior. But, to a greater extent, these advances have been fueled by some seminal findings and the accumulation of knowledge based on systematic inquiry in many laboratories around the world. This important volume, authored by internationally renowned leaders in the field, is a progress report on this burgeoning work. What processes underlie the formation of new memories? What determines their strength? Where are the changes underlying memory located? In judging recent progress, this book looks at what we have learned about each of these questions. Furthermore, the contributors look at how these questions are rephrased and refined by new findings, hypotheses, and theories. Topics include: emotion and memory, aging and memory, plasticity of the cerebral cortex, and synaptic connectivity and memory. This book will be welcomed by neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and cognitive scientists.

Lazarus offers a theory of emotion that is cognitive, motivational, and relational, a position he has pioneered over the last forty years. Clearly written and controversial, this book will appeal to both the student and professional researcher in personality, social, and clinical psychology, as well as in cognitive and development psychology. It is an ideal supplementary textbook in courses on psychology of adjustment and psychology of emotion and feeling.

Is invention really "99 percent perspiration and one percent inspiration" as Thomas Edison assured us? Inventive Minds assembles a group of authors well equipped to address this question: contemporary inventors of important new technologies, historians of science and industry, and cognitive psychologists interested in the process of creativity. In telling their stories, the inventors describe the origins of such remarkable devices as ultrasound, the electron microscope, and artificial diamonds. The historians help us look into the minds of innovators like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Michael Faraday, and the Wright brothers, drawing on original notebooks and other sources to show how they made their key discoveries. Finally, cognitive psychologists explore the mental processes that figure in creative thinking. Contributing to the authors' insight is their special focus on the "front end" of invention - where ideas come from and how they are transformed into physical prototypes. They answer three questions: How does invention happen? How does invention contrast with other commonly creative pursuits such as scientific inquiry, musical composition, or painting? And how might invention best happen - that is, what kinds of settings, conditions, and strategies appear to foster inventive activity? The book yields a wealth of information that will make absorbing reading for cognitive and social psychologists, social historians, and many working scientists and general readers who are interested in the psychology of personality and the roots of ingenuity.

"Mele provides us with a host of helpful examples, including ones from the psychological literature, on which to test theories and hone intuitions, provides clear and insightful discussion of the various theories advanced in the philosophical literature, and has interesting positive accounts of his own to offer".--"Philosophy and Phenomenological Research". (Philosophy)

To demystify creative work without reducing it to simplistic formulas, Doris Wallace and Howard Gruber, one of the world's foremost authorities on creativity, have produced a unique book exploring the creative process in the arts and sciences. The book's original`evolving systems approach' treats creativity as purposeful work and integrates cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, and motivational aspects of the creative process. Twelve revealing case studies explore the work of such diverse people as William Wordsworth, Albert Einstein, Jean Piaget, Anais Nin, and Charles Darwin. The case study approach is discussed in relation to other methods such as biography, autobiography, and psychobiology/ Emphasis is given to the uniqueness of each creative person; the social nature of creative work is also treated without losing the sense of the individual. A final chapter considers the relationship between creativity and morality in the nuclear age. In addition to developmental psychologists and cognitive scientists, this study offers fascinating insights for all readers interested in the history of ideas, scientific discovery, artistic discovery, artistic innovation, and the interplay of intuition, inspiration, and purposeful work.

The goal of this book is to introduce cognitive neuropsychology to a broad audience of clinicians and researchers. To orient readers who are interested in disorders of higher cortical function, but have little background in psychology, sufficient introductory material is provided, and yet each topic is explored in enough depth to serve as a reference for cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuropsychologists. The editor, David Margolin, M.D., Ph.D., has assembled a prominent group of researchers and clinicians, and each describes how the vocabulary, theoretical framework, and information-processing models of cognitive psychology are applied to various disorders of higher cortical function. Each chapter provides an overview of the disorder being discussed, develops a rationale for selecting the stimulus materials, and demonstrates how a given patient's deficits can be understood in terms of a breakdown in one or more cognitive domains. The contributors gear the chapters toward the practicing clinicians and use a step-by-step description of how one goes about determining the locus of the deficit in a patient. This cognitive neuropsychological approach is applied to disorders of attention, memory, language, vision, calculation, and motor control. A final chapter introduces the important role of neuroimaging techniques in diagnosis, which will continue to aid our understanding of brain-behavior relationships. Professionals in the fields of neuropsychology, neurology, clinical psychology, psychiatry, as well as practicing speech therapists and pathologists, will find this volume a comprehensive introduction to this increasingly important discipline.

This volume provides, for the first time, multidisciplinary perspectives on the problem of awareness of deficits following brain injury. Such deficits may involve perception, attention, memory, language, or motor functions, and they can seriously disrupt an individual's ability to function. However, some brain-damaged patients are entirely unaware of the existence or severity of their deficits, even when they are easily noticed by others. In addressing these topics, contributors cover the entire range of neuropsychological syndromes in which problems with awareness of deficit are observed: hemiplegia and hemianopia, amnesia, aphasia, traumatic head injury, dementia, and others. On the clinical side, leading researchers delineate the implications of awareness of deficits for rehabilitation and patient management, and the role of defense mechanisms such as denial. Theoretical discussions focus on the importance of awareness disturbances for better understanding such cognitive processes as attention, consciousness, and monitoring.

This book explores the interplay between physiological and psychological states in light of increasing evidence that they exert subtle, long-term influences not only on mood, but also perception, judgement, and cognitive processes in general; these, in turn, affect behaviour. Drawing on his own data from subjective assessments of mood and research by others, the author addresses questions such as what determines a person's mood and its changes; what is the relationship between mood and sugar snacking, smoking, coffee drinking, late-night worry, depression, and insomnia; what effect do exercise, time of day, nutrition, and sleep have on mood. This book will be of interest to researchers in personality, clinical, and physiological psychology and to laypersons interested in the topic.

An Unnatural History of Religions examines the origins, development, and critical issues concerning the history of religion and its relationship with science. The book explores the ideological biases, logical fallacies, and unwarranted beliefs that surround the scientific foundations (or lack thereof) in the academic discipline of the history of religions, positioning them in today's 'post-truth' culture. Leonardo Ambasciano provides the necessary critical background to evaluate the most important theories and working concepts dedicated to the explanation of the historical developments of religion. He covers the most important topics and paradigm shifts in the field, such as phenomenology, postmodernism, and cognitive science. These are taken into consideration chronologically, each time with case studies on topics such as shamanism, gender biases, ethnocentrism, and biological evolution. Ambasciano argues that the roots of post-truth may be deep in human biases, but that historical justifications change each time, resulting in different combinations. The surprising rise of once-fringe beliefs, such as conspiracy theories, pseudoscientific claims, and so-called scientific creationism, demonstrates the alarming influence that post-truth ideas may exert on both politics and society. Recognising them before they spread anew may be the first step towards a scientifically renewed study of religion.

Wie wirken sich kognitive 'Thinking for Speaking' Muster auf das Fremdsprachenlernen aus? Dieser Frage geht die Autorin mithilfe einer empirischen Untersuchung an deutschen Muttersprachlern nach, die Genustransfer anhand der Pronominalisierung und Kategorisierung von belebten, nicht-menschlichen Referenten (Tiernomen) beim Sprechen des Englischen erforscht. Chinesische und englische Muttersprachler dienen als Vergleichsgruppe. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass der Genustransfer durch eine unbewusste Fehlinterpretation des Genus zum Sexus ausgeloest wird. Die Existenz solcher kognitiven Muster bedeutet, dass das Erlernen einer neuen Sprache das Erlernen neuer Muster erfordert. Die Autorin folgert, dass die Genusvermittlung einen hoeheren Stellenwert im DaF-Unterricht erhalten sollte, um die kognitive Umstrukturierung zu foerdern.

An argument that the meaning of written or auditory linguistic signals is not derived from the input but results from the brain's internal construction process. When we read a text or listen to speech, meaning seems to be given to us instantaneously, as if it were part of the input. In Meaning in the Brain, Giosue Baggio explains that this is an illusion created by the tremendous speed at which sensory systems and systems for meaning and grammar operate in the brain. Meaning, Baggio argues, is not derived from input but results from the brain's internal construction process. With this book, Baggio offers the first integrated, multilevel theory of semantics in the brain, describing how meaning is generated during language comprehension, production, and acquisition. Baggio's theory draws on recent advances in formal semantics and pragmatics, including vector-space semantics, discourse representation theory, and signaling game theory. It is designed to explain a growing body of experimental results on semantic processing that have accumulated in the absence of a unifying theory since the introduction of electrophysiology and neuroimaging methods. Baggio argues that there is evidence for the existence of three semantic systems in the brain-relational semantics, interpretive semantics, and evolutionary semantics-and he discusses each in turn, developing neural theories of meaning for all three. Moreover, in the course of his argument, Baggio addresses several long-standing issues in the neuroscience of language, including the role of compositionality as a principle of meaning construction in the brain, the role of sensory-motor processes in language comprehension, and the neural and evolutionary links among meaning, consciousness, sociality, and action.

Neuropsychiatric problems after critical illness are receiving increasing attention, particularly in the critical care medicine literature, but mental health and primary care clinicians should also be interested in these common problems, given the growing number of critical illness survivors who need care. Patients frequently come out of the intensive care unit (ICU) with horrifying distorted memories and don't understand what has happened to them. Not only are patients debilitated with ICU-acquired weakness and cognitive impairment, they are traumatized by actual experiences (e.g., shortness of breath and pain) and distorted memories (of being tortured, raped, assaulted, or imprisoned) shaped by delirium. Patients' family members are also frequently quite distressed, and children surviving critical illnesses appear to have similar experiences to adults. This book provides an overview of the nature and epidemiology of cognitive and other psychiatric problems in this growing population, and it addresses the small but growing literature on prevention and early intervention efforts. Addressing these problems successfully will require collaborative interventions, both in-ICU and post-ICU.

Our world and bodies are becoming increasingly polluted with chemicals capable of interfering with our hormones and thus, possibly, our present and future neural and mental health. As authors Heather Patisaul and Scott Belcher outline, there is a large lack of data and evidence in this causal relationship, which begs a need for further study to accelerate progress in the endocrinology and neuroendocrinology fields. Endocrine Disruptors, Brain, and Behavior focuses on if and how these chemicals, known as endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs), affect the development and function of the brain and might be contributing to neural disorders rapidly rising in prevalence. The book provides an overall synthesis of the EDC field, including its historical roots, major hypotheses, key findings, and research gaps. The authors explain why even the concept of endocrine disruption is controversial in some circles, how differing definitions of endocrine disruption and what constitutes an "adverse" outcome on the brain shape public policy, and where the current capacity by different stakeholders (industry, academia, regulatory agencies) to evaluate chemicals for safety in a regulatory context begins and ends. The book concludes with suggestions for future research needs and a summary of emerging technology which might prove capable of more effectively evaluating existing and emerging chemicals for endocrine disrupting properties. As such, it provides the context for interdisciplinary and innovative input from a broad spectrum of fields, including those well-schooled in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, brain, behavior, sex differences, and neuroendocrinology.

How Soviet scientists and pseudoscientists pursued telepathic research, cybernetic simulations, and mass hyptonism over television to control the minds of citizens. In October 1989, as the Cold War was ending and the Berlin Wall about to crumble, television viewers in the Soviet Union tuned in to the first of a series of unusual broadcasts. "Relax, let your thoughts wander free..." intoned the host, the physician and clinical psychotherapist Anatoly Mikhailovich Kashpirovsky. Moscow's Channel One was attempting mass hypnosis over television, a therapeutic session aimed at reassuring citizens panicked over the ongoing political upheaval-and aimed at taking control of their responses to it. Incredibly enough, this last-ditch effort to rally the citizenry was the culmination of decades of official telepathic research, cybernetic simulations, and coded messages undertaken to reinforce ideological conformity. In Homo Sovieticus, the art and media scholar Wladimir Velminski explores these scientific and pseudoscientific efforts at mind control. In a fascinating series of anecdotes, Velminski describes such phenomena as the conflation of mental energy and electromagnetism; the investigation of aura fields through the "Aurathron"; a laboratory that practiced mind control methods on dogs; and attempts to calibrate the thought processes of laborers. "Scientific" diagrams from the period accompany the text. In all of the experimental methods for implanting thoughts into a brain, Velminski finds political and metaphorical contaminations. These apparently technological experiments in telepathy and telekinesis were deployed for purely political purposes.

Social neuroscience is a rapidly growing field which explains, using neural mechanisms, our ability to recognize, understand, and interact with others. Concepts such as trust, revenge, empathy, prejudice, and love are now being explored and unravelled by neuroscientists. This engaging and cutting-edge text provides an accessible introduction to the complex methods and concepts of social neuroscience, with examples from contemporary research and a blend of different pedagogical features helping students to engage with the material, including essay questions, summary and key points, and further reading suggestions. The second edition of this ground-breaking text has been thoroughly revised and expanded to reflect the growing volume of evidence and theories in the field. Notable additions include a greater emphasis on genetics and hormones, and the expansion of topics such as cultural neuroscience, emotion regulation, biological markers of autism, power and status, social categorization, and new accounts of mirror neuron functioning. The book is supported by a fully updated companion website, featuring student resources including lecture recordings, multiple choice questions and useful web links, as well as PowerPoint slides for lecturers. Richly illustrated in attractive full-color, with figures, boxes, and 'real-world' implications of research, this text is the ideal introduction to the field for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in fields such as psychology and neuroscience.

A comprehensive presentation of an approach that proposes a new account of cognition at levels from the cellular to the social. This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Enaction, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991), breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. Enaction offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science. Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science. Contributors Renaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Veronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Nunez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson

Our sense that a waltz is "in three" or a blues song is "in four with a shuffle" comes from our sense of musical meter. Hearing in Time explores the metric aspect of our musical experience from a psychological point of view. Musical meter is taken as a musically-specific instance entrainment, that is, our more general ability to synchronize our actions to the rhythms around us. As such, musical meter is subject to a number of fundamental perceptual and cognitive constraints. These constraints are the cornerstones of Hearing in Time's account of musical meter. Hearing in Time also takes into account the fact that listening to music, like many other rhythmic activities, is something that we do a lot. It also approaches musical meter in the context of music as it is actually performed, with nuances of timing and dynamics, rather than as a theoretical ideal. Hearing in Time's approach to meter is not based on any particular musical style or cultural practice, and so it discusses musical examples from a wide range of musical styles and cultures-from Beethoven and Bach to Brubeck and Ghanaian (Ewe) drumming. In taking this broad approach a number of fundamental similarities between a variety of different metric phenomena-such as the difference between so-called simple versus complex or additive meters-become apparent. Hearing in Time is written for musicians, musicologists, music theorists and psychologists who are interested in rhythm and meter. Only a modest ability read a musical score is presumed, and most musical examples are taken from familiar popular and classical repertory.

This book covers topics in formal linguistics, intonational phonology, computational linguistics, and experimental psycholinguistics, presenting them as an integrated theory of the language faculty. In this book Mark Steedman argues that the surface syntax of natural languages maps spoken and written forms directly to a compositional semantic representation that includes predicate-argument structure, quantification, and information structure without constructing any intervening structural representation. His purpose is to construct a principled theory of natural grammar that is directly compatible with both explanatory linguistic accounts of a number of problematic syntactic phenomena and a straightforward computational account of the way sentences are mapped onto representations of meaning. The radical nature of Steedman's proposal stems from his claim that much of the apparent complexity of syntax, prosody, and processing follows from the lexical specification of the grammar and from the involvement of a small number of universal rule-types for combining predicates and arguments. These syntactic operations are related to the combinators of Combinatory Logic, engendering a much freer definition of derivational constituency than is traditionally assumed. This property allows Combinatory Categorial Grammar to capture elegantly the structure and interpretation of coordination and intonation contour in English as well as some well-known interactions between word order, coordination, and relativization across a number of other languages. It also allows more direct compatibility with incremental semantic interpretation during parsing. The book covers topics in formal linguistics, intonational phonology, computational linguistics, and experimental psycholinguistics, presenting them as an integrated theory of the language faculty in a form accessible to readers from any of those fields.

How should we understand the self, as well as personal, relational and systemic growth? This volume proposes a radical new way of answering this question. It rests on a non-representational theory of knowledge on how to approach and understand the self and action more broadly. Although it has never been lost, the Aristotelian emphasis on excellence in moral character and practical reason as preconditions for achieving happiness has gradually been degraded. This book suggests that this has happened thanks to a split between knowledge and action that can be traced back to the origins of modernity. Modern academic disciplines in general, and psychology in particular, are based on the idealisation of theoretical, hypothetical and abstract reason, suggesting that this morally neutral ideal must guide human action. This volume systematically integrates those domains in a more profound and meaningful proposal, relevant for current times and challenges.Based on previous research bridging philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, the contributors here identify two alternative paradigms for conceiving of the self and human development: the so-called "autonomous self" (AS) and the "inter-processual self" (IPS). The book considers the person as an ethical being and as the foundational cornerstone of a new theory of self, action and knowing that achieves decisive distance from modern theory's limitations. To keep on-going dialogue on human development open, the authors introduce a new theoretical model (IPS) which can be scientifically measured and tested; they also suggest its further application in concrete, practical realms, thus touching on how the adoption of the IPS paradigm inspires a renewed view of human cognition, education, governance, and business management.

A partly descriptive and partly normative manual on constructing theories that are useful in the whole range of cognitive science. Specifies the characteristics of such an interdisciplinary theory an how it differs from theories in the individual disciplines. Provides a systematic overview of cognit

Until the mid-1980s, AI researchers assumed that an intelligent system doing high-level reasoning was necessary for the coupling of perception and action. In this traditional model, cognition mediates between perception and plans of action. Realizing that this core AI, as it was known, was illusory, Rodney A. Brooks turned the field of AI on its head by introducing the behavior-based approach to robotics. The cornerstone of behavior-based robotics is the realization that the coupling of perception and action gives rise to all the power of intelligence and that cognition is only in the eye of an observer. Behavior-based robotics has been the basis of successful applications in entertainment, service industries, agriculture, mining, and the home. It has given rise to both autonomous mobile robots and more recent humanoid robots such as Brooks' Cog.

This book represents Brooks' initial formulation of and contributions to the development of the behavior-based approach to robotics. It presents all of the key philosophical and technical ideas that put this "bottom-up" approach at the forefront of current research in not only AI but all of cognitive science.

This book delineates a pluralist and dynamic model of practical action which thoughtfully takes into account the reflexive conception of agency that is, by and large, prevailing in current social sciences research. Such a model will challenge the one the cognitive sciences have rather successfully imposed on our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and action. To make this model available, the book compares Wittgenstein's theses on knowing, the pragmatist outlook on inquiry and the analysis of action in common offered by interactionist sociology. It thus shows how an integrated theory of practical action would warrant a radically contextual conception of human individual and collective behaviour.