Why do boys instinctively bullsh*t more than girls? How do economic recessions shape a generation's confidence? Can we have too much confidence and, if so, what are the consequences?

Imagine we could discover something that could make us richer, healthier, longer-living, smarter, kinder, happier, more motivated and more innovative. Ridiculous, you might say... What is this elixir? Confidence. If you have it, it can empower you to reach heights you never thought possible. But if you don't, it can have a devastating effect on your future.

Confidence lies at the core of what makes things happen. Exploring the science and neuroscience behind confidence that has emerged over the last decade, clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson tells us how confidence plays out in our minds, our brains and indeed our bodies. He explains where it comes from and how it spreads - with extraordinary economic and political consequences. And why it's not necessarily something you are born with, but something that can be learned.

Are people rational? This question was central to Greek thought; and has been at the heart of psychology and philosophy for millennia. This book provides a radical and controversial reappraisal of conventional wisdom in the psychology of reasoning, proposing that the Western conception of the mind as a logical system is flawed at the very outset. It argues that cognition should be understood in terms of probability theory, the calculus of uncertain reasoning, rather than in terms of logic, the calculus of certain reasoning.

Eye movements are a vital part of our interaction with the world. They play a pivotal role in perception, cognition, and education. Research in this field is now proceeding at a considerable pace and casting new light on how the eyes move and what information we can derive during the frequent and brief periods of fixation. However, the origins of this work are less well known, even though much of our knowledge was derived from this research with far more primitive equipment. This book is unique in tracing the history of eye movement research. It shows how great strides were made in this area before modern recording devices were available, especially in the measurement of nystagmus. When photographic techniques were adapted to measure discontinuous eye movements, from about 1900, many of the issues that are now basic to modern research were then investigated. One of the earliest cognitive tasks examined was reading, and it remains in the vanguard of contemporary research. Modern researchers in this field will be astonished at the subtleties of these early experimental studies and the ingenuity of interpretations that were advanced one and even two centuries ago. Though physicians often carried out the original eye movement research, later on it was pursued by psychologists - it is within contemporary neuroscience that we find these two strands reunited. Anyone interested in the origins of psychology and neuroscience will find much to stimulate and surprise them in this valuable new work.

Advances in Motivation Science, Volume Nine, the latest release in Elsevier's serial on the topic of motivation science, contains interesting articles that cover topics such as The Relentless Pursuit of Acceptance and Belonging, Reward uncertainty and the aversion-attraction dilemma, Neurobiological Mechanisms of Selectivity in Motivated Memory, Accounting for long-term motivation and sustained motivated learning, Interest: A Unique Affective and Cognitive Motivational Variable That Develops, and Neural systems for aversively motivated behavior, Neural systems for aversively motivated behavior, and more.

This book presents and discusses seven contemporary theoretical approaches to behavior analysis that build upon the foundations laid by B.F. Skinner's radical behaviorism and renew its legacy. These contemporary approaches show that behaviorism is not a monolithic or static intellectual tradition, but a dynamic movement, which changes and adapts in face of new questions, issues, and perspectives. The death of behaviorism has been proclaimed since its early days - a "premature" assessment, to say the least - but this volume shows that behaviorism is alive and kicking, even thirty years after its main proponent passed away. This volume contains seven sections, each one dedicated to a particular variation of contemporary behaviorism: Howard Rachlin's teleological behaviorism, William Baum's molar behaviorism and multiscale behavior analysis, John Staddon's theoretical behaviorism, John Donahoe's biological behaviorism, Gordon Foxall's intentional behaviorism, Steven Hayes' contextual behaviorism or contextual behavioral science, and Emilio Ribes-Inesta's field-theory behaviorism. Each section contains three chapters: the first one written by the original proponent of each of these forms of behaviorism, the second one written by a commentator, and the third one written by the proponent, replying to the commentator. Contemporary Behaviorisms in Debate will be a valuable tool to behavior analysts and psychologists in general by providing an introduction to contemporary forms of behaviorism and promoting debates about the main philosophical issues faced by the field of behavior analysis today- issues that can directly influence future epistemological variations in the selection process of "behaviorisms." By doing so the book is directed not only to the present, but, more importantly, toward the future of the field.

Psychology is of interest to academics from many fields, as well as to the thousands of academic and clinical psychologists and general public who can't help but be interested in learning more about why humans think and behave as they do. This award-winning twelve-volume reference covers every aspect of the ever-fascinating discipline of psychology and represents the most current knowledge in the field. This ten-year revision now covers discoveries based in neuroscience, clinical psychology's new interest in evidence-based practice and mindfulness, and new findings in social, developmental, and forensic psychology.

The second edition of this book brings together a cutting edge international team of contributors to critically review the current knowledge regarding the effectiveness of training interventions designed to improve cognitive functions in different target populations. Since the publication of the first volume, the field of cognitive research has rapidly evolved. There is substantial evidence that cognitive and physical training can improve cognitive performance, but these benefits seem to vary as a function of the type and the intensity of interventions and the way training-induced gains are measured and analyzed. This book will address the new topics in psychological research and aims to resolve some of the currently debated issues. This book offers a comprehensive overview of empirical findings and methodological approaches of cognitive training research in different cognitive domains (memory, executive functions, etc.), types of training (working memory training, video game training, physical training, etc.), age groups (from children to young and older adults), target populations (children with developmental disorders, aging workers, MCI patients etc.), settings (laboratory-based studies, applied studies in clinical and educational settings), and methodological approaches (behavioral studies, neuroscientific studies). Chapters feature theoretical models that describe the mechanisms underlying training-induced cognitive and neural changes. Cognitive Training: An Overview of Features and Applications, Second Edition will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, students, and professors in the fields of psychology and neuroscience.

While the field of vision science has grown significantly in the past three decades, there have been few comprehensive books that showed readers how to adopt a computional approach to understanding visual perception, along with the underlying mechanisms in the brain. Understanding Vision explains the computational principles and models of biological visual processing, and in particular, of primate vision. The book is written in such a way that vision scientists, unfamiliar with mathematical details, should be able to conceptually follow the theoretical principles and their relationship with physiological, anatomical, and psychological observations, without going through the more mathematical pages. For those with a physical science background, especially those from machine vision, this book serves as an analytical introduction to biological vision. It can be used as a textbook or a reference book in a vision course, or a computational neuroscience course for graduate students or advanced undergraduate students. It is also suitable for self-learning by motivated readers. in addition, for those with a focused interest in just one of the topics in the book, it is feasible to read just the chapter on this topic without having read or fully comprehended the other chapters. In particular, Chapter 2 presents a brief overview of experimental observations on biological vision; Chapter 3 is on encoding of visual inputs, Chapter 5 is on visual attentional selection driven by sensory inputs, and Chapter 6 is on visual perception or decoding. Including many examples that clearly illustrate the application of computational principles to experimental observations, Understanding Vision is valuable for students and researchers in computational neuroscience, vision science, machine and computer vision, as well as physicists interested in visual processes.

This volume contains selected and edited papers from the 7th European Conference on Eye Movements (ECEM 7) held in Durham, UK on August 31-September 3 1993. The volume is organized as follows: - Invited Lectures, Pursuit and Co-Ordination, Saccade and Fixation Control, Oculomotor Physiology, Clinical and Medical Aspects of Eye Movements, Eye Movements and Cognition, Eye Movements and Language and finally, Displays and Applications

For years now, learning has been at the heart of research within cognitive psychology. How do we acquire new knowledge and new skills? Are the principles underlying skill acquisition unique to learning, or similar to those underlying other behaviours? Is the mental system essentially modular, or is the mental system a simple product of experience, a product that, inevitably, reflects the shape of the external world with all of its specialisms and similarities? This new book takes the view that learning is a major influence on the nature of the processes and representations that fill our minds. Throughout, the authors review and consider the areas of skill acquisition and lexical representation to illustrate the effects that practice can have on cognitive processes. They also draw parallels between theories in physical and biological domains to propose not only a new theory of mental function but also demonstrate that the mind is essentially subject to the same natural laws as the physical world. In so doing Speelman and Kirsner present a new perspective on psychology - one that identifies universal principles underlying all behaviours and one which contrasts markedly from our current focus on highly specific behaviours. Accessibly written, Beyond the Learning Curve is a thought provoking and challenging new text for students and researchers in the cognitive sciences.

Mitchell S. Green presents a systematic philosophical study of self-expression - a pervasive phenomenon of the everyday life of humans and other species, which has received scant attention in its own right. He explores the ways in which self-expression reveals our states of thought, feeling, and experience, and he defends striking new theses concerning a wide range of fascinating topics: our ability to perceive emotion in others, artistic expression, empathy, expressive language, meaning, facial expression, and speech acts. He draws on insights from evolutionary game theory, ethology, the philosophy of language, social psychology, pragmatics, aesthetics, and neuroscience to present a stimulating and accessible interdisciplinary work.