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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Experimental psychology
Everyone knows what consciousness is: it is what vanishes when we fall into dreamless sleep and reappears when we wake up or when we dream. However, we become less and less confident when we are called to answer fundamental questions about the relationships between consciousness and the physical world. Why is the cerebral cortex associated with consciousness, but not the liver, the heart, the cerebellum or other neural structures? Why does consciousness fade during deep sleep, while cortical neurons remain active? Can unresponsive patients with an island of active cortex surrounded by widespread damage be conscious? Is an artificial system that outperforms people at driving, recognizing faces and objects, and answering difficult questions conscious? Using the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a guiding principle, Sizing up Consciousness explores these questions, taking the reader along a fascinating journey from the cerebral cortex to the cerebellum, from wakefulness to sleep, anesthesia, and coma, supercomputers, octopuses, dolphins, and much more besides. By translating theoretical principles into practical measurements, the book outlines a preliminary attempt to identify a general rule to size up the capacity for consciousness within the human skull and beyond. Sizing up Consciousness is a short, accessible book, spanning neuronal activity to existential considerations and is essential reading for anyone interested in awareness and cognition.
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.
The discovery of mirror neurons caused a revolution in neuroscience and psychology. Nevertheless, because of their profound impact within life sciences, mirror neuron are still the subject of numerous debates concerning their origins and their functions. With more than 20 years of research in this area, it is timely to synthesise the expanding literature on this topic. 'New frontiers in Mirror Neurons' provides a comprehensive overview of the latest advances in mirror neurons research - accessible both to experts and to non-experts. In the book, leading scholars draw on the latest research to examine methodological approaches, theoretical implications, and the latest findings on mirror neurons research. A broad range of topics are covered within the book: basic findings and new concepts in action-perception theory, functional properties and evolution, development, and clinical implications. In particular, the last two sections of the book outline the importance of the plasticity and development of the mirror neuron system. This knowledge will be key in future research for helping us understand possible disorders associated with impairments in the mirror neurons system, as well as in helping us design new therapeutic tools for interventions within the field of neurodevelopmental disorders and in neurorehabilitation. 'New Frontiers in Mirror Neurons' is an exciting new work for neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind.
In the past few years, there has been an explosion of eye movement research in cognitive science and neuroscience. This has been due to the availability of 'off the shelf' eye trackers, along with software to allow the easy acquisition and analysis of eye movement data. Accompanying this has been a realisation that eye movement data can be informative about many different aspects of perceptual and cognitive processing. Eye movements have been used to examine the visual and cognitive processes underpinning a much broader range of human activities, including, language production, dialogue, human computer interaction, driving behaviour, sporting performance, and emotional states. Finally, in the past thirty years, there have been real advances in our understanding of the neural processes that underpin eye movement behaviour. The Oxford Handbook of Eye Movements provides the first comprehensive review of the entire field of eye movement research. In over fifty chapters, it reviews the developments that have so far taken place, the areas actively being researched, and looks at how the field is likely to devlop in the coming years. The first section considers historical and background material, before moving onto section 2 on the neural basis of eye movements. The third and fourth sections looks at visual cognition and eye movements and eye movement pathology and development. The final sections consider eye movements and reading and language processing and eye movements. Bringing together cutting edge research from and international team of leading psychologists, neuroscientists, and vision researchers, this book is the definitive reference work in this field.
Musical imagination and creativity are amongst the most abstract and complex aspects of musical behaviour, though, until recently, they have been difficult to subject to empirical enquiry. However, music psychology and some allied disciplines have now developed, both theoretically and methodologically, to the point where some of these topics are now firmly within our grasp. The study of creativity and imagination is growing rapidly in disciplines including psychology, sociology, neuroscience, and education. The inter- and multidisciplinary study of music, and developments in music psychology in particular, mean that studies of musical imagination and creativity in action are now distinctly possible 'Musical Imaginations' is a wide ranging, multidisciplinary review of the latest theory and research on musical creativity, performance and perception by some of the most eminent scholars in their respective disciplines. The topics addressed in this book include the investigation of creativity and imagination in music and emotion, composition and improvisation, performance and performance traditions, listening strategies, different musical genres and cultural belief systems, social collaboration, identity formation, and the development of psychologically-based strategies and interventions for the enhancement of performing musicians. With creativity now a topic of significant interest, this book will be valuable to all those in the fields of psychology, sociology, neuroscience, education, as well as to musicians themselves - dealing with practical as well as theoretical issues in music therapy, performance and education. The study of creativity and imagination is growing rapidly in disciplines including psychology, sociology, neuroscience, and education. The inter- and multidisciplinary study of music, and developments in music psychology in particular, mean that studies of musical imagination and creativity in action are now distinctly possible. This book undertakes a multidisciplinary review of these developments. It contains a wide range of contributions by some of the most eminent scholars in their respective disciplines, representing a comprehensive account of the state of the art of theory and research on musical creativity, performance and perception.
Culture - broadly defined as all we learn from others that endures for long enough to generate customs and traditions - shapes vast swathes of our lives and has allowed the human species to dominate the planet in an evolutionarily unique way. Culture and cultural evolution are uniquely significant phenomena in evolutionary biology: they are products of biological evolution, yet they supplement genetic transmission with social transmission, thus achieving a certain independence from natural selection. However, cultural evolution nevertheless expresses key Darwinian processes itself and also interacts with genetic evolution. Just how culture fits into the grander framework of evolution is a big issue though, yet one that has received relatively little scientific attention compared to, for example, genetic evolution. Our 'capacity for culture' appears so distinctive among animals that it is often thought to separate we cultural beings from the rest of nature and the Darwinian forces that shape it. 'Culture Evolves' presents a different view arising from the recent discoveries of a diverse range of disciplines, that focus on evolutionary continuities. First, recent studies reveal that learning from others and the transmission of traditions are more widespread and significant across the animal kingdom than earlier recognized, helping us understand the evolutionary roots of culture. Second, archaeological discoveries have pushed back the origins of human culture to much more ancient times than traditionally thought. These developments together suggest important continuities between animal and human culture. A third new array of discoveries concerns the later diversification of human cultures, where the operations of Darwinian-like, cultural evolutionary processes are increasingly identified. Finally, surprising discoveries have been made about the imprint of cultural evolution in children's predisposition to acquire culture. The result of a major interdisciplinary meeting held by he Royal Society and the British Academy, this book presents the work of leading experts from the fields of ethology, behavioural ecology, primatology, comparative psychology, archaeology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and developmental psychology.
Human behaviour is marvellous in its complexity, variability and unpredictability. Understanding it, however, is not solely the role of psychologists: everyone has a vested interest in it, from individuals to organisations and industry. Recently, biologists and psychologists have had considerable success incorporating insights from evolutionary theory to help them understand some fundamental psychological issues, in a discipline now known as evolutionary psychology. However, to date, these useful insights have not been widely applied to tackle specific practical problems or issues in society. This innovative new book kick-starts this process. It provides a foundation for an incipient focus on applications of evolutionary research. It draws together a collection of renowned academics from a disparate set of fields, whose common interest lies in using evolutionary thinking to inform their research. Topics range from reviews of evolutionary perspectives on adult and family relationships, insights into business, economics and marketing, health and interactions with technology and the media, through to major global and societal issues such as promoting green behaviour, cooperation, and public health, and tackling crime, terrorism, and prejudice. No other book has focused as specifically and with such broad scope on the applications of modern evolutionary psychology. While the rapidly growing number of books on evolutionary psychology succeed in describing current theoretical thinking, illustrated and supported by empirical studies, this book uses this established basis as a backdrop and starting point for a more focused exploration of practical application. This groundbreaking book will be valuable for students and researchers in evolutionary and applied psychology, as well as biology and anthropology.
This latest volume in the critically acclaimed and highly
influential Attention and Performance series focuses on two of the
fastest moving research areas in cognitive and affective
neuroscience - decision making and emotional processing.
'Affective computing' is a branch of computing concerned with the
theory and construction of machines which can detect, respond to,
and simulate human emotional states. It is an interdisciplinary
field spanning the computer sciences, psychology, and cognitive
science. Affective computing is a rapidly developing field within
industry and science. There is now a great drive to make
technologies such as robotic systems, avatars in service-related
human computer interaction, e-learning, game characters, or
companion devices more marketable by endowing the 'soulless' robots
or agents with the ability to recognize and adjust to the user's
feelings as well as to be able to communicate appropriate emotional
signals.
Our ability to attend selectively to our surroundings - taking
notice of the things that matter, and ignoring those that don't -
is crucial if we are to negotiate the world around us in an
efficient manner. Several aspects of the temporal dimension turn
out to be critical in determining how we can put together and
select the events that are important to us as they themselves
unfold over time. For example, we often miss events that happen
while we are occupied perceiving or responding to another stimulus.
On the other hand, temporal regularity between events can also
greatly improve our perception. In addition, our perception of the
passage of time itself can also be distorted as while we are
performing actions or paying attention to different aspects of the
environment. Surprisingly, this fascinating and fundamental
interplay between ' attention' and 'time' has been relatively
neglected in the psychology and neuroscience literatures until very
recently.
The activity of neurons in the brain is noisy in that their firing times are random when they are firing at a given mean rate. This introduces a random or stochastic property into brain processing which we show in this book is fundamental to understanding many aspects of brain function, including probabilistic decision making, perception, memory recall, short-term memory, attention, and even creativity. In The Noisy Brain we show that in many of these processes, the noise caused by the random neuronal firing times is useful. However, this stochastic dynamics can be unstable or overstable, and we show that the stability of attractor networks in the brain in the face of noise may help to understand some important dysfunctions that occur in schizophrenia, normal aging, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The Noisy Brain provides a unifying computational approach to brain function that links synaptic and biophysical properties of neurons through the firing of single neurons to the properties of the noise in large connected networks of noisy neurons to the levels of functional neuroimaging and behaviour. The book describes integrate-and-fire neuronal attractor networks with noise, and complementary mean-field analyses using approaches from theoretical physics. The book shows how they can be used to understand neuronal, functional neuroimaging, and behavioural data on decision-making, perception, memory recall, short-term memory, attention, and brain dysfunctions that occur in schizophrenia, normal aging, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The Noisy Brain will be valuable for those in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and biology from advanced undergraduate level upwards. It will also be of interest to those interested in neuroeconomics, animal behaviour, zoology, psychiatry, medicine, physics, and philosophy. The book has been written with modular chapters and sections, making it possible to select particular Chapters for course work. Advanced material on the physics of stochastic dynamics in the brain is contained in the Appendix.
The ability to communicate through spoken and written language is
one of the defining characteristics of the human race, yet it
remains a deeply mysterious process. The young science of
psycholinguistics attempts to uncover the mechanisms and
representations underlying human language. This interdisciplinary
field has seen massive developments over the past decade, with a
broad expansion of the research base, and the incorporation of new
experimental techniques such as brain imaging and computational
modelling. The result is that real progress is being made in the
understanding of the key components of language in the mind.
Do humans start life with the capacity to detect and mentally
represent the objects around them? Or is our object knowledge
instead derived only as the result of prolonged experience with the
external world? Are we simply able to perceive objects by watching
their actions in the world, or do we have to act on objects
ourselves in order to learn about their behavior? Finally, do we
come to know all aspects of objects in the same way, or are some
aspects of our object understanding more epistemologically
privileged than others?
Blindsight is an unusual condition where the sufferer can respond
to visual stimuli, while lacking any conscious feeling of having
seen the stimuli. It occurs after a particular form of brain
injury.
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 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.
This Brief introduces two empirically grounded models of situated mental phenomena: contextual social cognition (the collection of psychological processes underlying context-dependent social behavior) and action-language coupling (the integration of ongoing actions with movement-related verbal information). It combines behavioral, neuroscientific, and neuropsychiatric perspectives to forge a novel view of contextual influences on active, multi-domain processes. Chapters highlight the models' translational potential for the clinical field by focusing on diseases compromising social cognition (mainly illustrated by behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia) and motor skills (crucially, Parkinson's disease). A final chapter sets forth metatheoretical considerations regarding intercognition, the constant binding of processes triggered by environmental and body-internal sources, which confers a sensus communis to our experience. In addition, the book includes two commentaries written by external peers pondering on advantages and limits of the proposal. Contextual Cognition will be of interest to students, teachers, and researchers from the fields of cognitive science, neurology, psychiatry, neuroscience, psychology, behavioral science, linguistics, and philosophy.
The nature of attention is one of the oldest and most central problems in psychology. A huge amount of research has been produced on this subject in the last half century, especially on attention in the visual modality, but a general explanation has remained elusive. Many still view attention research as a field that is fundamentally fragmented. This book takes a different perspective and presents a unified theory of visual attention: the TVA model. The TVA model explains the many aspects of visual attention by just two mechanisms for selection of information: filtering and pigeonholing. These mechanisms are described in a set of simple equations, which allow TVA to mathematically model a large number of classical results in the attention literature. The theory explains psychological and neuroscientific findings by the same equations; TVA is a complete theory of visual attention, linking mind and brain. Aimed at advanced students and professional researchers, Principles of Visual Attention contains a detailed review of the most important research done on attention in vision, spanning cognitive psychology, brain imaging, patient studies, and recordings from single cells in the visual cortex. The book explains the TVA model and shows how it accounts for attentional effects observed across all the research areas described. Principles of Visual Attention offers a uniquely integrated view on a central topic in cognitive neuroscience.
For many years the Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior
Research (Scherer & Ekman, 1982) has been an invaluable text
for researchers looking for methods to study nonverbal behavior and
the expression of affect. A successor to this essential text, The
New Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior Research includes
chapters on coding and methodological issues for a variety of areas
in nonverbal behavior: facial actions, vocal behavior, and body
movement. Issues relevant to judgment studies, methodology,
reliability, analyses, etc. have also been updated. The topics are
broad and include specific information about methodology and coding
strategies in education, psychotherapy, deception, nonverbal
sensitivity, and marital and group behavior. There is also a
chapter detailing specific information on the technical aspects of
recording the voice and face, and specifically in relation to
deception studies.
Memory, attention, and decision-making are three major areas of psychology. They are frequently studied in isolation, and using a range of models to understand them. This book brings a unified approach to understanding these three processes. It shows how these fundamental functions for cognitive neuroscience can be understood in a common and unifying computational neuroscience framework. This framework links empirical research on brain function from neurophysiology, functional neuroimaging, and the effects of brain damage, to a description of how neural networks in the brain implement these functions using a set of common principles. The book describes the principles of operation of these networks, and how they could implement such important functions as memory, attention, and decision-making. The topics covered include The hippocampus and memory Reward and punishment related learning: emotion and motivation Visual object recognition learning Short term memory Attention, short term memory, and biased competition Probabilistic decision-making Action selection Decision-making Also included are tutorial appendices on Neural networks in the brain Neural encoding in the brain 'Memory, Attention and Decision-Making' will be valuable for those in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience from advanced undergraduate level upwards. It will also be of interest to those interested in neuroeconomics, animal behaviour, zoology, evolutionary biology, psychiatry, medicine, and philosophy. The book has been written with modular chapters and sections, making it possible to select particular Chapters for course work.
Speaking is one of the most complex skills that humans perform. In our everyday communication, we transfer sentences, concepts, thoughts, and ideas. How though, is the speaker able to convert these into movements of the speech apparatus? These speech movements are the observable end-product, but what neurological, psycholinguistic, and perceptual-motor processes lie behind their production? To fully understand speech disorders, such as stuttering, apraxia of speech, and Parkinsonian dysarthria, the disruptions in this complex interplay are highly relevant. Equally important is the question of how the infant develops from random babbling to precisely controlled production of words, syllables, and phonemes. This volume presents state of the art research in the science of speech motor control and speech disorders. All the chapters take a fundamental, model-oriented perspective, as introduced in the first section of the volume. Further topics covered in this book are: brain imaging studies and the rapid progression in comprehending neural mechanisms; developmental studies revealing perceptual-motor continuities and discontinuities; psycholinguistic experimentation showing higher-order influences on speech motor control; and recent notions and applications to the understanding of speech disorders.
Working memory has been one of the most intensively studied systems
in cognitive psychology. It is only relatively recently however
that researchers have been able to study the neural processes might
underlye working memory, leading to a proliferation of research in
this domain.
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. 'Emotion Explained' describes the nature, functions, and brain mechanisms that underlie both emotion and motivation. However it 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.
'Working Memory, Thought, and Action' is the magnum opus of one of the most influential cognitive psychologists of the past 50 years. This new volume on the model he created (with Graham Hitch) discusses the developments that have occurred within the model in the past twenty years, and places it within a broader context. Working memory is a temporary storage system that underpins our capacity for coherent thought. Some 30 years ago, Baddeley and Hitch proposed a way of thinking about working memory that has proved to be both valuable and influential in its application to practical problems. This book updates the theory, discussing both the evidence in its favour, and alternative approaches. In addition, it discusses the implications of the model for understanding social and emotional behaviour, concluding with an attempt to place working memory in a broader biological and philosophical context. Inside are chapters on the phonological loop, the visuo-spatial sketchpad, the central executive and the episodic buffer. There are also chapters on the relevance to working memory of studies of the recency effect, of work based on individual differences, and of neuroimaging research. The broader implications of the concept of working memory are discussed in the chapters on social psychology, anxiety, depression, consciousness and on the control of action. Finally, Baddeley discusses the relevance of a concept of working memory to the classic problems of consciousness and free will. This new volume from one of the pioneers in memory research will doubtless emulate the success of its predecessor, and be a major publication within the psychological literature.
In everyday life, and particularly in the modern workplace, information technology and automation increasingly mediate, augment, and sometimes even interfere with how humans interact with their environment. How to understand and support cognition in human-technology interaction is both a practically and socially relevant problem. The chapters in this volume frame this problem in adaptive terms: How are behavior and cognition adapted, or perhaps ill-adapted, to the demands and opportunities of an environment where interaction is mediated by tools and technology? The authors draw heavily on the work of Egon Brunswik, a pioneer in ecological and cognitive psychology, as well as on modern refinements and extensions of Brunswikian ideas, including Hammond's Social Judgment Theory, Gigerenzer's Ecological Rationality and Anderson's Rational Analysis. Inspired by Brunswik's view of cognition as "coming to terms" with the "casual texture" of the external world, the chapters in this volume provide quantitative and computational models and measures for studying how people come to terms with an increasingly technological ecology, and provide insights for supporting cognition and performance through design, training, and other interventions. The methods, models, and measures presented in this book provide timely and important resources for addressing problems in the rapidly growing field of human-technology interaction. The book will be of interest to researchers, students, and practitioners in human factors, cognitive engineering, human-computer interaction, judgment and decision making, and cognitive science.
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. |
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