First published in English in 1969, the book opens with a chapter by Pierre Oleron on intellectual activities. These fall into three groups: inductive activities (the apprehension of laws, relations and concepts), reasoning and problem solving. It describes typical methods and essential results obtained by relevant experiments. There are two chapters by Jean Piaget and his collaborator Barbel Inhelder. The first, on mental images, breaks new ground: it describes original experiments carried out by Piaget and associates with children of various ages. Piaget examines the relations between images and motor activity, imitation, drawing and operations. He also classifies images according to their degree of complexity and show why children have inadequate images of some processes. The second chapter is on intellectual operations and Piaget gives a summary of the main findings of a number of his earlier books, on the child's notions of conservation, classification, seriation, number, measurement, time, speed and chance. In the last chapter, Pierre Greco discusses learning and intellectual structures. He describes the work of psychologists with rats in mazes and formulating theories of animal learning. Gestalt psychology and various other interpretations are examined and Greco also pays attention to Piaget's view of 'structural learning' based on experience.

This monograph brings together important research that the author and his colleagues at the University of New England have been conducting into the early stages of reading development, and makes a valuable contribution to the debate about literacy education. It should appeal to a broad audience since it is written in an entertaining and accessible style, with chapter summaries, and where appropriate short tutorials in relevant topics, in particular Learnability Theory (Chapter 1), levels of language structure (Chapter 2) and writing systems (Chapter 2). It will be of interest to experimental psychologists concerned with the reading process, developmental psychologists interested in cognitive growth, educational psychologists interested in the application of experimental methods in the classroom situation, and teachers and teacher educators.

Based on Estes' important Fitts Lectures, this volume details a set of psychological concepts and principles that offers a unified interpretation of a wide variety of memory, categorization, and decision-making phenomena. These phenomena are explained via two families of models established by the author: a storage-retrieval model and an adaptive network model. Estes considers whether the models are competing or complementary, offering cogent and instructive arguments for both perspectives. Estes' theory is then applied to two large-scale series of studies on category learning and recognition, providing an integrated understanding of seemingly disparate phenomena. This book is the culmination of the author's more than ten years of research in the field, and stands as a great achievement by one of this century's eminent psychologists. It will be indispensable to a wide variety of behavioral scientists, including mathematical and cognitive psychologists.

First published in English 1968, in this volume Paul Fraisse begins with history, looking at the evolution of experimental psychology, starting with its origins. He then moves on to the establishment of experimental psychology around the world. In the second chapter he discusses the experimental method. In the third chapter Jean Piaget tackles the questions of explanation and parallelism and their problems within experimental psychology. The final chapter by Maurice Reuchlin goes on to discuss measurement in psychology looking at various scales with their experimental conditions and numerical properties.

Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Free Will and Responsibility brings together leading researchers from psychology and philosophy to present new findings and ideas about human agency and moral responsibility. Their contributions reflect the growth of research in these areas over the past decade and highlight both the ways that philosophy can be relevant to empirical research and how empirical work can be relevant to philosophical investigations. Mixing new empirical work with the meta-philosophical and philosophical upshot of the latest research being done, chapters cover motivated cognition and free will beliefs, folk intuitions about manipulation and agency, mental control in assessments of responsibility, the importance of skilled decision making to free will judgments and the relationship between free will and substance dualism. Blending cutting-edge research from philosophy with methods from psychology, this collection is a compelling example of the value of interdisciplinary approaches, contributing to our understanding of the complex networks of attitudes, beliefs, and judgments that inform how we think about agency and responsibility.

Over the last decade, there has been a revolution in our understanding of the physiological role of the cochlea (the inner ear), and the mechanisms of cochlear hearing loss, the most common type in adults, which results in distortions in sound perception. This is the first book to cover the topic; aimed at students and researchers in auditory rehabilitation and its technology, it explains the nature of hearing distortion and relates them to the underlying physiological mechanisms. It provides a theoretical framework for understanding the changes that follow cochlear damage which had important implications not only for theories of normal perception but also the design of signal processing hearing aids.

"This book is the fruit of Alex Shepherd's remarkable teaching experience in one of the most prestigious universities in the world. This publication will certainly become the main reference for science students at BSc, MSc and PhD levels." Roberto Filippi, PhD, University College London "I highly recommend this book as essential reading for psychology students at all levels from undergraduate to PhD. It provides a friendly and engaging guide to developing critical evaluation skills through the use of clear and accessible examples that capture the reader's interest." Dr Elisa Lewis, Senior Lecturer, London South Bank University "Alex Shepherd offers an accessible forensic filleting of published research articles, with helpful how-to guides showing what questions to ask and (more importantly) what the answers mean." Gina Rippon, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Neuroimaging, Author of The Gendered Brain If something is published, does that mean it's true? Critical Analysis in Experimental Psychology encourages the critical reading and analysis of psychological research reports and shows how design principles and statistics are applied. A.J. Shephard empowers you to read between the lines of any published study and draw your own conclusions. Using synopses of published research articles as examples, the book shows how to work out if summary claims made by authors or the media accurately reflect an experiment's real findings. Through guided analysis of both quantitative and qualitative real-world research, you will learn to: *Review research articles comprehensively and critically *Understand the rationale, logic, and purpose of an article *Identify the hypotheses (whether stated or unstated) *Describe and assess the suitability of the research methods used *Analyse the implied interpretation of the results, *Become an active - rather than a passive - reader of scientific articles. This book gives new insight into published research articles, helping you feel less like a student and more like a researcher. The critical skills learned will help you to navigate through the confusing science messages we are exposed to through all types of media. Dr A.J. Shepherd has over 20 years of experience teaching Critical Analysis. She is a Reader in Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, UK and since 2004 she has run the third year Critical Analysis course, which she also designed.

The Neuroscience of Meditation: Understanding Individual Differences explores the individual differences in learning and practicing meditation, while also providing insights on how to learn and practice effectively. The book comprehensively covers the research in brain areas and networks that mediate the positive effects of meditation upon physical and mental health. Though it examines how people differ in how they learn and practice meditation, it underscores how underlying mechanisms differ in learning and practicing meditation and how they remain unclear to researchers. This book addresses the research gap and explores the brain science behind meditation.

This book is a collection of Leea (TM)s most important works, placed in a historical setting and contextualized through the commentaries of other leading researchers in the field. The contributors were selected on the basis of their standing in the field. Some have been directly involved in collaborations with Lee, while others have participated in public discussions on particular controversies. All contributors know David Lee well as a researcher and scholar, and some know him on a more personal levela "as a student, supervisor, mentor, or friend. It is this mixture of involvements with David Lee and his writings that yields a unique exchange of ideas on the origins of movement. Closing the Gap: The Scientific Writings of David N. Lee is an invaluable resource for academics and postgraduate students studying perceptuo-motor control.

A cognitive psychology which becomes increasingly specialized requires a special effort in order to avoid a fragmentation into several controversial issues that are independently discussed but also inherently related. Rather than asking additional differentiated questions which are then investigated by more specialized experimental methods and designs, this book promotes unified theories and a levels approach for their experimental evaluation. Within this cognitive science approach and on the basis of the most foundational assumptions of Kintsch's construction integration theory, a computational theory of knowledge acquisition is then developed and subsequently evaluated by psychological experiments.
For forty years, computer simulation techniques and experimental psychology research have greatly matured the understanding of human knowledge and its acquisition in different learning environments. This volume critically assesses the advantages and limitations of these approaches and then develops an integrated research methodology. It goes on to provide significant progress concerning the following questions:
* What are the most promising research methodologies for investigating human cognition?
* How can the experimental psychology research on text comprehension, concept formation, and memory become more closely related to one another when the very specialized research paradigms and the highly specific scientific controversies promote their separation and independent discussion?
* How can a general comprehension-based theory bridge the gap between simple experimental settings and the real-life situations that occur in education and work environments?
This book demonstrates how experimental psychology can proceed more successfully by investigating those aspects that are shared among different areas of research like text comprehension, categorization, and learning by exploration. It also shows how unified theories can assist in applying experimental psychology and cognitive science results to areas such as intelligent tutoring systems, instructional design, and the development of expert systems in complex real world domains.

"Winnicott" and "sex" are two subjects that are rarely associated with one another. Sexuality is not a prominent theme within the work of Winnicott, who preferred to concentrate on the development of the self from infancy. However, his writings contain unexplored insights into sexuality and it is these hidden insights that prompted Lesley Caldwell to invite papers from leading analysts to expand upon them.This collection provides a fresh and innovative look at the work of Winnicott and into sexuality, in particular infantile sexuality. The unusual link of Winnicott to Freud and to psychoanalysis located in the drives encourages a different perspective into British psychoanalysis. Other diverse themes include a historical examination of Winnicott through the British Society; an exploration of the similarities between Laplanche and Winnicott; a parallel reading of Winnicott's paper on transitional objects and transitional phenomena and Donne's "The Good Morrow"; linking Rilke through his poem "Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes" to Winnicott; the use of Winnicott's work in the treatment of sexual dysfunction; and the interrelation between sexuality and play.The sixth volume in the Winnicott Studies Monograph series, these papers will appeal to all practicing psychoanalysts and will open a new perspective on D.W. Winnicott.Contributors: Mario Bertolini, Lesley Caldwell, Andreas Giannakoulas, Andre Green, Joyce McDougall, Francesca Neri, Adam Phillips, Helen Taylor Robinson, Dominique Scarfone, and Maggie Schaedel

Are scientific 'facts' about body image enough to define conceptions of normality? Reassessing Experimental Psychology from a critical perspective, Sylvia Blood demonstrates how its research into Body Image can be misused and prone to misuse. Classifying women who experience distress and anxiety with food, eating and body size as suffering 'body image disturbance' or 'body image dissatisfaction', it can reproduce dominant assumptions about language, meaning and subjectivity. Experimental psychology's discourse about body image has recently become more widely influential, becoming popularised through domains such as women's magazines, in which psychological experts provide 'facts' about women's 'body image problems', and offer advice and psychological treatments. With acute cross-disciplinary awareness Body Work: The Social Construction of Women's Body Image exposes the assumptions at work in the methods and status of experimental approaches. Penetrating beyond the usual dichotomy between experimental and popular psychology, this book illuminates some of the ways in which women's magazines have embraced experimental psychology's treatment of the issue. Drawing on her experience in Clinical Psychology, Sylvia Blood highlights the damaging effects of uncritically experimental views of body image. She goes on to elaborate not only an alternative model of discursive construction but also the implications of such a theory for clinical practice. Merging theory and clinical experience, Sylvia Blood exposes the fallacies about women's bodies that underpin experimental psychology's body image research. She demonstrates the dangerous consequences of these fallacies being accepted as truths in popular texts and in the talk of 'everyday' women.

Scientists' understanding of two central problems in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy has been greatly influenced by the work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel: (1) What is it to see? This relates to the machinery that underlies visual perception. (2) How do we acquire the brain's mechanisms for vision? This is the nature-nurture question as to whether the nerve connections responsible for vision are innate or whether they develop through experience in the early life of an animal or human. This is a book about the collaboration between Hubel and Wiesel, which began in 1958, lasted until about 1982, and led to a Nobel Prize in 1981. It opens with short autobiographies of both men, describes the state of the field when they started, and tells about the beginnings of their collaboration. It emphasizes the importance of various mentors in their lives, especially Stephen W. Kuffler, who opened up the field by studying the cat retina in 1950, and founded the department of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, where most of their work was done. The main part of the book consists of Hubel and Wiesel's most important publications. Each reprinted paper is preceded by a foreword that tells how they went about the research, what the difficulties and the pleasures were, and whether they felt a paper was important and why. Each is also followed by an afterword describing how the paper was received and what developments have occurred since its publication. The reader learns things that are often absent from typical scientific publications, including whether the work was difficult, fun, personally rewarding, exhilarating, or just plain tedious. The book ends with a summing-up of the authors'view of the present state of the field. This is much more than a collection of reprinted papers. Above all it tells the story of an unusual scientific collaboration that was hugely enjoyable and served to transform an entire branch of neurobiology. It will appeal to neuroscientists, vision scientists, biologists, psychologists, physicists, historians of science, and to their students and trainees, at all levels from high school on, as well as anyone else who is interested in the scientific process.

The Trolley Problem is one of the most intensively discussed and controversial puzzles in contemporary moral philosophy. Over the last half-century, it has also become something of a cultural phenomenon, having been the subject of scientific experiments, online polls, television programs, computer games, and several popular books. This volume offers newly written chapters on a range of topics including the formulation of the Trolley Problem and its standard variations; the evaluation of different forms of moral theory; the neuroscience and social psychology of moral behavior; and the application of thought experiments to moral dilemmas in real life. The chapters are written by leading experts on moral theory, applied philosophy, neuroscience, and social psychology, and include several authors who have set the terms of the ongoing debates. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars working on any aspect of the Trolley Problem and its intellectual significance.

The Trolley Problem is one of the most intensively discussed and controversial puzzles in contemporary moral philosophy. Over the last half-century, it has also become something of a cultural phenomenon, having been the subject of scientific experiments, online polls, television programs, computer games, and several popular books. This volume offers newly written chapters on a range of topics including the formulation of the Trolley Problem and its standard variations; the evaluation of different forms of moral theory; the neuroscience and social psychology of moral behavior; and the application of thought experiments to moral dilemmas in real life. The chapters are written by leading experts on moral theory, applied philosophy, neuroscience, and social psychology, and include several authors who have set the terms of the ongoing debates. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars working on any aspect of the Trolley Problem and its intellectual significance.

Good scientific research depends on critical thinking at least as much as factual knowledge; psychology is no exception to this rule. And yet, despite the importance of critical thinking, psychology students are rarely taught how to think critically about the theories, methods, and concepts they must use. This book shows students and researchers how to think critically about key topics such as experimental research, statistical inference, case studies, logical fallacies, and ethical judgments. Using updated research findings and new insights, this volume provides a comprehensive overview of what critical thinking is and how to teach it in psychology. Written by leading experts in critical thinking in psychology, each chapter contains useful pedagogical features, such as critical-thinking questions, brief summaries, and definitions of key terms. It also supplies descriptions of each chapter author's critical-thinking experience, which evidences how critical thinking has made a difference to facilitating career development.

This book presents an historical and conceptual reconstruction of the theories developed by Meinong and a group of philosophers and experimental psychologists in Graz at the turn of the 19th century. Adhering closely to original texts, the contributors explore Meinong's roots in the school of Brentano, complex theories such as the theory of intentional reference and direct reference, and ways of developing philosophy which are closely bound up with the sciences, particularly psychology. Providing a faithful reconstruction of both Meinong's contributions to science and the school that arose from his thought, this book shows how the theories of the Graz school raise the possibility of engaging in the scientific metaphysics and ontology that for so long have been considered off limits.

Animal Intelligence is a consolidated record of Edward L. Thorndike's theoretical and empirical contributions to the comparative psychology of learning. Thorndike's approach is systematic and comprehensive experimentation using a variety of animals and tasks, all within a laboratory setting. When this book first appeared, it set a compelling example, and helped make the study of animal behavior very much an experimental laboratory science.

This landmark study in the investigation of animal intelligence illustrates Thorndike's thinking on the evolution of the mind. It includes his formal statement of the influential law of effect, which had a significant impact on other behaviorists. Hull's law of primary reinforcement was closely related to the law of effect and Skinner acknowledged that the process of operant conditioning was probably that described in the law of effect.

The new introduction by Darryl Bruce is an in-depth study of Thorndike's legacy to comparative psychology as well as a thorough retrospective review of Animal Intelligence. He includes a biographical introduction of the behaviorist and then delves into his theories and work. Among the topics Bruce covers with respect to Thorndike's studies are the nature of animal intelligence, the laws of learning and connectionism, implications for comparative psychology, and relation to theories of other behaviorists. Animal Intelligence is an intriguing analysis that will be of importance to psychologists and animal behaviorists.

In laboratory research, the process of conditioning is traditionally initiated with a single intermittent stimulus (such as a tone or flash of light). This is true of both classical and instrumental research. Because of its role in evoking conditioned behavior, the use of an intermittent stimulus has become an indispensable part of laboratory research on conditioned behavior. The question arises whether the same scheme of conditioning may be applied to behaviors occurring in real life.

In Conditioning, Wanda Wyrwicka analyzes evidence of the influence of situations on behavior in laboratory studies. She looks at cases in which the subject's reaction was dependent on complex situations rather than a single stimulus. Wyrwicka suggests that beyond external situations there exists internal factors located in the brain that consist of previous and present experiences that may influence behavior. In Chapter 1, Wyrwicka summarizes Ivan Pavlov's concept of the conditioned reflex using intermittent stimuli. Chapter 2 deals with the mechanisms of motor conditioned behavior and the results of instrumental conditioning studies. Chapter 3 covers the phenomenon called "switching," which is the appearance of a conditioned reaction different than the original conditioned stimulus. In Chapter 4, Wyrwicka describes various studies in which situation becomes a potent factor in conditioned reactions. Chapter 5 describes research pertaining to defensive and alimentary behaviors. Chapter 6 analyzes three examples of complex conditioning: detour, feeding, and presleep behaviors. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the functions of various internal organs, and the conditioning of electrical brain activity leading to inhibition of epileptic seizures. In her concluding chapter, Wyrwicka discusses theoretically the data mentioned previously.

Conditioning opens up rich possibilities for continued exploration. This revealing work will interest scientists specializing in behavioral sciences, psychologists, neuroscientists, educators, as well as students of biology.

Why are some people more mentally able than others ? In an authoritative, critical and intergrated series of review essays Professor Ian Deary inquires after the cognitive and biological foundations of human mental ability differences. Many accounts of intelligence have examined the structure and number of human mental ability differences and whether they can predict sucess in education,work and social life. Few books have taken psychometric intelligence differences as a starting point and brought together the reductionistic attempts to explain them.New to the highly acclaimed Oxford Psychology Series, Looking Down on Human Intelligence appraises the search for the origins of psychometric intelligence differences in terms of brain function parameters. The book provides an original and thought provoking guide to ancient and modern research on one of the most compelling questions in human psychology.

Psychology's most famous theories--played out in real life! Forget the labs and lecture halls. You can conduct your very own psych experiments at home! Famous psychological experiments--from Freud's ego to the Skinner box--have changed the way science views human behavior. But how do these tests really work? In Psych Experiments, you'll learn how to test out these theories and experiments for yourself...no psychology degree required! Guided by Michael A. Britt, creator of popular podcast The Psych Files, you can conduct your own experiments when browsing your favorite websites (to test the "curiosity effect"), in restaurants (learning how to increase your tips), when presented with advertisements (you'd be surprised how much you're influenced by the color red), and even right on your smartphone (and why you panic when you can't find it). You'll even figure out how contagious yawning works! With this compulsively readable little book, you won't just read about the history of psychology--you'll live it!