![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Experimental psychology
The phenomenon of hypnosis provides a rich paradigm for those
seeking to understand the processes that underlie consciousness.
Understanding hypnosis tells us about a basic human capacity for
altered experiences that is often overlooked in contemporary
western societies. Throughout the 200
With Beyond Rationality, Kenneth R. Hammond, one of the most
respected and experienced experts in judgment and decision-making,
sums up his life's work and persuasively argues that decisions
should be based on balance and pragmatism rather than rigid
ideologies.
Does listening to Mozart make us more intelligent? Is there such a thing as a gay gene? Does the size of the brain matter? Does the moon influence our behaviour? Can we communicate with the dead? Can graphology tell us anything about a person's character? Is the human brain clonable? What role do dreams have in cognition? Can mind conquer matter and diseases? Are out-of-body experiences possible? Can we trust our intuitions? To some, the answer to all these questions might well be a resounding 'no', but to many people these represent serious beliefs about the mind and brain - beliefs that drive their everyday behaviour, beliefs that cost them huge amounts of money. Whole industries have developed founded on these dubious claims about the mind and brain. Even major corporations have dabbled with assessment methods such as those advocated by graphology, accepting and rejecting candidates on the basic of their handwriting. Expectant parents buy books and tapes by the dozen showing them how to improve the intelligence of their child by playing them classical music. People subscribe to expensive therapies founded on beliefs rather than science, or risk their health buying books that tell them how they can conquer illness through positive thinking, perhaps at the expense of more scientifically proven treatments. Tall Tales about the Mind and Brain presents a sweeping survey of common myths about the mind and brain. In a lighthearted and accessible style, it exposes the truth behind these beliefs, how they are perpetuated, why people believe them, and why they might even exist in the first place.
Our ability to map and intervene in the structure of the human
brain is proceeding at a very quick rate. Advances in psychiatry,
neurology, and neurosurgery have given us fresh insights into the
neurobiological basis of human thought and behavior. Technologies
like MRI and PET scans can detect early signs of psychiatric
disorders before they manifest symptoms. Electrical and magnetic
stimulation of the brain can non-invasively relieve symptoms of
obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and other conditions
resistant to treatment, while implanting neuro-electrodes can help
patients with Parkinsons and other motor control-related diseases.
New drugs can help regenerate neuronal connections otherwise
disrupted by schizophrenia and similar diseases.
Good reasoning can lead to success; bad reasoning can lead to catastrophe. Yet, it's not obvious how we reason, and why we make mistakes - so much of our mental life goes on outside our awareness. In recent years huge strides have been made into developing a scientific understanding of reasoning. This new book by one of the pioneers of the field, Philip Johnson-Laird, looks at the mental processes that underlie our reasoning. It provides the most accessible account yet of the science of reasoning. We can all reason from our childhood onwards - but how? 'How we reason' outlines a bold approach to understanding reasoning. According to this approach, we don't rely on the laws of logic or probability - we reason by thinking about what's possible, we reason by seeing what is common to the possibilities. As the book shows, this approach can answer many of the questions about how we reason, and what causes mistakes in our reasoning that can lead to disasters such as Chernobyl. It shows why our irrational fears may become psychological illnesses, why terrorists develop 'crazy' ideologies, and how we can act in order to improve our reasoning. The book ends by looking at the role of reasoning in three extraordinary case histories: the Wright brothers' use of analogies in inventing their flyer, the cryptanalysts' deductions in breaking the German's Enigma code in World War II, and Dr. John Snow's inductive reasoning in discovering how cholera spread from one person to another. Accessible, stimulating, and controversial, How we Reason presents a bold new approach to understanding one of the most intriguing facets of being human.
First published in 1995, 'The Visual Brain in Action' remains a
seminal publication in the cognitive sciences. It presents a model
for understanding the visual processing underlying perception and
action, proposing a broad distinction within the brain between two
kinds of vision: conscious perception and unconscious 'online'
vision. It argues that each kind of vision can occur
quasi-independently of the other, and is separately handled by a
quite different processing system. In the 11 years since
publication, the book has provoked considerable interest and debate
- throughout both cognitive neuroscience and philosophy, while the
field has continued to flourish and develop.
The creation and consolidation of a memory can rest on the integration of any number of possibly disparate features and contexts - colour, sound, emotion, arousal, context. How is it that these bind together to form a coherent memory? What is the role of binding in memory formation? What are the neural processes that underlie binding? Do these binding processes change with age? This book offers an unrivalled overview of one of the most debated hotspots of modern memory research: binding. It contains 28 chapters on binding in different domains of memory, presenting classic research from the field of cognitive neuroscience. It is written by renowned scientists and leaders in the field who have made fundamental contributions to the rapidly expanding field of neurocognitive memory research. As well as presenting a state-of-the-art account of recent views on binding and its importance for remembering, it also includes a review of recent publications in the area, of benefit to both students and active researchers. More than just a survey, it supplies the reader with an integrative view on binding in memory, fostering deep insights not only into the processes and their determinants, but also into the neural mechanisms enabling these processes. The content also encompasses a wide range of binding-related topics, including feature binding, the binding of items and contexts during encoding and retrieval, the specific roles of familiarity and recollection, as well as task- and especially age-related changes in these processes. A major section is dedicated to in-depth analyses of underlying neural mechanisms, focusing on both medial temporal and prefrontal structures. Computational approaches are covered as well. For all students and researchers in memory, the book will not only enhance their understanding of binding, but will instigate innovative and pioneering ideas for future research.
There are auditory books and visual books, but neither type of book uses the other sense to illustrate the common issues in perception. This volume's comparison of hearing and seeing, or "listening to" and "looking at" provides the means to isolate what is common to perception and what is specific to each sensory system. There are only 3 or 4 types of visual receptors, each with overlapping but different wavelength sensitivity, but there are about 2,000 auditory receptors, again with overlapping wavelength sensitivity. Through comparisons such as this one, Handel illustrates how the number and sensitivity of the receptors match the properties of the stimuli. "Far from being a dry recitation of the facts of seeing and hearing, Handel's book is a unique attempt to dig out the similarities and interactions between these two modes of perception. While providing a detailed account of many aspects of our perceptual systems, at both a functional and a physiological level, the author always bears in mind what the incoming sensory information is about (a single world containing objects, events, and various sources of light and of acoustic energy). He explains how this fact of a single world shaped the heuristic methods used by these systems - some described by the Gestalt psychologists - to build a coherent perceived world. The focus is always on this coherence and how it emerges from specialised processes at many levels. Full of interesting analogies, the book is very provocative and contains enough challenging ideas for individual readers to be able to find specific ones to puzzle over, whether they be students or professional researchers, and regardless of their theoretical views of perception." - Albert Bregman, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, McGill University "Stephen Handel's book "Perceptual Coherence: Seeing and Hearing" reframes object and event perception in a coherent theoretical scheme based on the dynamic perceiving of "things" in space and time. The subject of "thing-based" perceptual coherence is timely and of crucial importance with the increasing interest in multisensory integration in the realms of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The text is written with Handel's habitual crystal clarity, depth of thought and pedagogical talent. It will certainly be a treasure trove of facts, concepts and new directions for researchers and students alike. - Stephen McAdams, PhD, Director, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media & Technology.
The basic laboratory technique for studying distinctiveness effect in memory is the isolation paradigm, a simple test in which a list of items is presented for memorisation. All items except one are similar in some way. The different item always occurs late in the list, to allow the similarity of the precedingitems to establish a context. Subsequent memory for the different item is always better than for the similar items. In 1948, Jenkins and Postman offered the intuitive-differential attention explanation to account for this difference in memory, that an item is remembered because it catches the subject's attention by violating the established context, so leads the subject to devote additional processing to it. It is this additional processing that accounts for enhanced memory. Since 1948, succeeding theories have accepted and perpetuated their explanation. In fact, the isolation effect and the intuitive explanation have applied to most other memory phenomena that fall under the rubric of bizarreness, salience and novelty. The contributors to the proposed volume argue that the intuitive-differential-attention explanation and theories following from it are incorrect. The purpose of the volume is to test these currently accepted theories by contrasting them with the results of current research on the processes supporting them. The result is a much needed restructuring of the theories.
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.
What produces emotions? Why do we have emotions? How do we have emotions? Why do emotional states feel like something? This book seeks explanations of emotion by considering these questions. Emotion continues to be a topic of enormous scientific interest. This new book, a successor to 'The Brain and Emotion', (OUP, 1998), describes the nature, functions, and brain mechanisms that underlie both emotion and motivation. 'Emotion Explained' goes beyond examining brain mechanisms of emotion, by proposing a theory of what emotions are, and an evolutionary, Darwinian, theory of the adaptive value of emotion. It also shows that there is a clear relationship between motivation and emotion. The book also examines how cognitive states can modulate emotions, and in turn, how emotions can influence cognitive states. It considers the role of sexual selection in the evolution of affective behaviour. It also examines emotion and decision making, with links to the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics. The book is also unique in considering emotion at several levels - the neurophysiological, neuroimaging, neuropsychological, behavioural, and computational neuroscience levels.
Whether reading, looking at a picture, or driving, how is it that we know where to look next - how does the human visual system calculate where our gaze should be directed in order to achieve our cognitive aims? Of course, there is an interaction between the decisions about where we should look and about how long we should look there. However, our eyes do not just move randomly over the visual field - whether we are reading, driving, or solving a problem. There are systematic variations not only in the duration of each eye fixation, but also in what we are looking at. It is these variations in eye movements that can tell us much about the cognitive processes involved in the performance of these activities. Within reading research, great progress has already been made in understanding these processes and there are now a number of competing and well-formed models. In some other areas of perception, the development of formal theories and the search for critical evidence is less advanced. This book brings together leading vision scientists studying eye movements across a range of activities, such as reading, driving, computer activities, and chess. It provides groundbreaking new research that will help us understand how it is that we know where to move our eyes, and thereby better understand the cognitive processes underlying these activities.
What are the fundamental mechanisms of decision making, processing speed, memory and cognitive control? How do these give rise to individual differences, and how do they change as people age? How are these mechanisms implemented in neural unctions, in particular the functions of the frontal lobe? How do they relate to the demands of everyday, 'real life' behaviour? Over almost five decades, Pat Rabbitt has been among the most distinguished of British cognitive psychologists. His work has been widely influential in theories of mental speed, cognitive control and aging, influencing research in experimental psychology, neuropsychology and individual differences. This volume, dedicated to Pat Rabbitt, brings together a distinguished group of 16 contributors actively pursuing research in the fields of speed, memory, and control, and the application of these fields to individual differences and aging. With the latest work from senior figures in the field, and a focus on fundamental topics in both teaching and research, the book will be valuable to students and scientists in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
Adaptation phenomena provide striking examples of perceptual plasticity and offer valuable insight into the mechanisms of visual coding. The technique of psychophysical adaptation has aptly been termed the psychologist's microelectrode because of its usefulness in investigating the coding of sensory information in the human brain. Its broader relevance though is illustrated by the increasing use of adaptation to study more cognitive aspects of vision such as the mechanisms of face perception and the neural substrates of visual awareness. This book brings together a collection of studies from international researchers, which demonstrate the brain's remarkable capacity to adapt its representation of the visual world in response to changes in its environment. A major theme throughout is that adaptation at all stages of visual processing serves a functional role in the efficient representation of the prevailing visual environment. Information about the visual world is coded in the rate at which neurons fire. However, neurons can only respond over a certain range of firing rates. Adaptation of the way in which neurons code visual information tends to make optimal use of this limited response range. Though these principles are well established at the level of light adaptation in the retina, it is only relatively recently that researchers have started to look for analogous behaviour at the higher levels of the visual system. This book is the first to bring together evidence that adaptation in high-level vision, as at the lower levels, serves to fit the mind to the world.
Many organisms possess multiple sensory systems, such as vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. The possession of such multiple ways of sensing the world offers many benefits. These benefits arise not only because each modality can sense different aspects of the environment, but also because different senses can respond jointly to the same external object or event, thus enriching the overall experience-for example, looking at an individual while listening to them speak. However, combining the information from different senses also poses many challenges for the nervous system. In recent years, there has been dramatic progress in understanding how information from different sensory modalities gets integrated in order to construct useful representations of external space; and in how such multimodal representations constrain spatial attention. Such progress has involved numerous different disciplines, including neurophysiology, experimental psychology, neurological work with brain-damaged patients, neuroimaging studies, and computational modelling. This volume brings together the leading researchers from all these approaches, to present the first integrative overview of this central topic in cognitive neuroscience.
Several Python programming books feature tools designed for experimental psychologists. What sets this book apart is its focus on eye-tracking. Eye-tracking is a widely used research technique in psychology and neuroscience labs. Research grade eye-trackers are typically faster, more accurate, and of course, more expensive than the ones seen in consumer goods or usability labs. Not surprisingly, a successful eye-tracking study usually requires sophisticated computer programming. Easy syntax and flexibility make Python a perfect choice for this task, especially for psychology researchers with little or no computer programming experience. This book offers detailed coverage of the Pylink library, a Python interface for the gold standard EyeLink (R) eye-trackers, with many step-by-step example scripts. This book is a useful reference for eye-tracking researchers, but you can also use it as a textbook for graduate-level programming courses.
Colour has long been a source of fascination to both scientists and philosophers. In one sense, colours are in the mind of the beholder, in another sense they belong to the external world. Colours appear to lie on the boundary where we have divided the world into 'objective' and 'subjective' events. They represent, more than any other attribute of our visual experience, a place where both physical and mental properties are interwoven in an intimate and enigmatic way. The last few decades have brought fascinating changes in the way that we think about 'colour' and the role 'colour' plays in our perceptual architecture. In Colour: Mind and the Physical World, leading scholars from cognitive psychology, philosophy, neurophysiology, and computational vision provide an overview of the contemporary developments in our understanding of colours and of the relationship between the 'mental' and the 'physical'. With each chapter followed by critical commentaries, the volume presents a lively and accessible picture of the intellectual traditions which have shaped research into colour perception. Written in a non-technical style and accessible to an interdisciplinary audience, the book will provide an invaluable resource for researchers in colour perception and the cognitive sciences.
This book explores the relationship between cellular processes and animal behaviour. It does this by focusing on the domain of navigation, bringing together scientists from either side of the brain-behaviour divide in an attempt to explain the linkage between spatial behaviour and the underlying activity of neurons. The Neurobiology of Spatial Behaviour is organised into two sections. Section one deals with the so-called 'higher' levels of description - studies of spatial behaviour and the brain areas that might underlie such behaviour. The section begins with insects, remarkably sophisticated navigators, and ends with humans, examining along the way issues such as whether animal brains contain maps and whether spatial and non-spatial information interact, and if so, how? Section two delves further into the brain and focuses on the mammalian representation of space and the role of place cells. These issues have far wider ramifications that simply helping us to understand the process of navigation. This system might provide a model for how other forms of knowledge, beliefs and intentions are encoded in neurons. As such, the book will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience, including ethologists, psychologists, behavioural neuroscientists, computational modelers, physiological neuroscientists and molecular biologists.
In 1953 a young female Japanese macaque called Imo began washing sweet potatoes before eating them, presumably to remove dirt and sand grains. Soon other monkeys had adopted this behaviour, and potato-washing gradually spread throughout the troop. When, three years after her first invention, Imo devised a second novel foraging behaviour, that of separating wheat from sand by throwing mixed handfuls into water and scooping out the floating grains, she was almost instantly heralded around the world as a 'monkey genius'. Imo is probably the most celebrated of animal innovators. In fact, many animals will invent new behaviour patterns, adjust established behaviours to a novel context, or respond to stresses in an appropriate and novel manner. Innovation is an important component of behavioural flexibility, vital to the survival of individuals in species with generalist or opportunistic lifestyles, and potentially of critical importance to those endangered or threatened species forced to adjust to changed or impoverished environments. Innovation may also have played a central role in avian and primate brain evolution. Yet until recently animal innovation has been subject to almost complete neglect by behavioural biologists, psychologists, social learning researchers, and conservation-minded biologists. This collection of stimulating and readable articles by leading scientific authorities is the first ever book on 'animal innovation', designed to put the topic of animal innovation on the map and heighten awareness of this developing field.
Sleep has long been a topic of fascination for artists and scientists. Why do we sleep? What function does sleep serve? Why do we dream? What significance can we attach to our dreams? We spend so much of our lives sleeping, yet its precise function is unclear, in spite of our increasing understanding of the processes generating and maintaining sleep. We now know that sleep can be accompanied by periods of intense cerebral activity, yet only recently has experimental data started to provide us with some insights into the type of processing taking place in the brain as we sleep. There is now strong evidence that sleep plays a crucial role in learning and in the consolidation of memories. Once the preserve of psychoanalysts, 'dreaming' is now a topic of increasing interest amongst scientists. With research into sleep growing, this volume is both timely and valuable in presenting a unique study of the relationship between sleep, learning, and memory. It brings together a team of international scientists researching sleep in both human and animal subjects. Aimed at researchers within the fields of neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology, this book will be an important first step in developing a full scientific understanding of the most intriguing state of consciousness.
In the 1960s, Americans combined psychedelics with Buddhist meditation to achieve direct experience through altered states of consciousness. As some practitioners became more committed to Buddhism, they abandoned the use of psychedelics in favor of stricter mental discipline, but others carried on with the experiment, advancing a fascinating alchemy called psychedelic Buddhism. Many think exploration with psychedelics in Buddhism faded with the revolutionary spirit of the sixties, but the underground practice has evolved into a brand of religiosity as eclectic and challenging as the era that created it. Altered States combines interviews with well-known figures in American Buddhism and psychedelic spirituality-including Lama Surya Das, Erik Davis, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold Sensei, Rick Strassman, and Charles Tart-and personal stories of everyday practitioners to define a distinctly American religious phenomenon. The nuanced perspective that emerges, grounded in a detailed history of psychedelic religious experience, adds critical depth to debates over the controlled use of psychedelics and drug-induced mysticism. The book also opens new paths of inquiry into such issues as re-enchantment, the limits of rationality, the biochemical and psychosocial basis of altered states of consciousness, and the nature of subjectivity.
Implicit memory refers to a change in task performance due to an earlier experience that is not consciously remembered. The topic of implicit memory has been studied from two quite different perspectives for the past 20 years. On the one hand, researchers interested in memory have set out to characterize the memory system (or systems) underlying implicit memory, and see how they relate to those underlying other forms of memory. The alternative framework has considered implicit memory as a by-product of perceptual, conceptual, or motor systems that learn. That is, on this view the systems that support implicit memory are heavily constrained by pressures other than memory per se. Both approaches have yielded results that have been valuable in helping us to understand the nature of implicit memory, but studied somewhat in isolation and with little collaboration. This volume is unique in explicitly contrasting these approaches, bringing together world class scientists from both camps in an attempt to forge a new approach to understanding one of the most exciting and important issues in psychology and neuroscience. Written for postgraduate students and researchers in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, this is a book that will have an important influence on the direction that future research in this field takes.
While making a distinction between meditation-based and Langerian mindfulness, Sayyed Mohsen Fatemi illustrates the components of Langerian phenomenology by expanding and explaining the concept of mindfulness and its implications. Fatemi argues that a shift from epistemology to ontology in Langerian mindfulness will result in the rise of a radical and transformational consciousness.
The term 'episodic memory' refers to our memory for unique, personal experiences, that we can date at some point in our past - our first day at school, the day we got married. It has again become a topic of great importance and interest to psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. How are such memories stored in the brain, why do certain memories disappear (especially those from early in childhood), what causes false memories (memories of events we erroneously believe have really taken place)? Since Endel Tulving's classic book 'Episodic memory' (OUP, 1983) very few books have been published on this topic. In recent years however, many of the assumptions made about episodic memory have had to be reconsidered as a result of new techniques, which have allowed us a far deeper understanding of episodic memory. In 'Episodic memory: new directions in research' three of the worlds leading researchers in the topic of memory have brought together a stellar team of contributors from the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience, to present an account of what we now know about about this fundamentally important topic. The list of contributors includes, amongst others, Daniel Schacter, Richard Morris, Fareneh Vargha-Khadem, and Endel Tulving. The work presented within this book will have a profound effect on the direction that future research in this topic will take. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
Better Choices - Ensuring South Africa's…
Greg Mills, Mcebisi Jonas, …
Paperback
Hidden Markov Models in Finance
Rogemar S. Mamon, Robert J Elliott
Hardcover
R2,989
Discovery Miles 29 890
Problems of Nonlinear Deformation - The…
E.I. Grigolyuk, V.I. Shalashilin
Hardcover
R4,505
Discovery Miles 45 050
Dating - Secrets for Introverts - How to…
James W Williams
Hardcover
|