Connecting the study of cognition to everyday life, Goldstein and van Hooff’s bestselling text Cognitive Psychology provides an accessible and engaging introduction to the subject, giving insight into the many psychological and physiological aspects of human behaviour.

Now in its third edition and containing the latest stimulating research, this text helps students navigate through all the major sub-disciplines and key concepts of cognitive psychology. It facilitates development of a thorough understanding of the complex relationships between mind, brain and behaviour.

Through the authors’ international approach and emphasis on research, methodology and application, students learn how to interpret theories and then use them in practical applications.

With an accessible, easy-to-understand writing style, Cognitive Psychology, Seventh Edition will give you the tools you need to be successful in the course.

You'll explore the basics of cognitive neuroscience, attention and consciousness, perception, memory, knowledge representation, language, problem solving and creativity, decision making and reasoning, and intelligence. The authors' "from lab to life" approach covers theory, lab and field research, and applications to everyday life that demonstrate the relevance of what you are studying.

A review of key themes at the end of every chapter will help you spend more time studying important information and less time trying to figure out what you need to know.

A mother of small children trusts her 'gut feelings' and it saves her life.

A young dad is able to grieve for his lost baby – using a song.

What if there were parts of our minds which we never use, but if awakened, could make us so much happier, connected and alive? What if awakening those parts could bring peace to the conflicts and struggles we all go through?

From the cutting edge, where therapy meets neuroscience, Steve Biddulph explores the new concept of 'supersense' – the feelings beneath our feelings – which can guide us to a more awake and free way of living every minute of our lives. And the Four-storey Mansion, a way of using your mind that can be taught to a five-year-old, but can also help the most damaged adult.

In Fully Human, Steve Biddulph draws on deeply personal stories from his own life, as well of those of his clients, and from the frontiers of thinking about how the brain works with the body and the wisdom of the `wild creature' inside all of us. At the peak of a lifetime's work, one of the world's best-known psychotherapists and educators shows how you can be more alive, more connected. More FULLY HUMAN.

From the bestselling author of Raising Boys.

Why have people from different cultures and eras formulated myths and stories with similar structures? What does this similarity tell us about the mind, morality, and structure of the world itself?

From the author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos comes a provocative hypothesis that explores the connection between what modern neuropsychology tells us about the brain and what rituals, myths, and religious stories have long narrated.

A cutting-edge work that brings together neuropsychology, cognitive science, and Freudian and Jungian approaches to mythology and narrative, Maps of Meaning presents a rich theory that makes the wisdom and meaning of myth accessible to the critical modern mind.

A fascinating, practical guide to making better decisions with our money, health and personal lives from Gerd Gigerenzer, the author of Reckoning with Risk. Numbers don't lie - but they often mislead us. From health risks to financial decisions, we often find it hard to make decisions because the statistics have been presented to us by 'experts' who misinterpret the data themselves. Here Gerd Gigerenzer shows how we can all use simple rules to become better-informed, risk-savvy citizens. 'Important, Gigerenzer draws valuable lessons . . . his clear explanations will be a great help to all' Omar Malik, Times Higher Education 'Gerd Gigerenzer argues that when it comes to taking risks in life, we are often much better off following our instincts than expert advice' Oliver Burkeman, Guardian 'Things will only get better, he shows, when specialists, particularly doctors and investment advisers, improve on their appalling record of analysing and communicating risks in their fields' Clive Cookson, Financial Times, Books of the Year 'Gigerenzer is brilliant' Steven Pinker Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on heuristics and decision making, including Reckoning with Risk.

Executive Functions in Children's Everyday Lives captures the diversity and complexity of the executive system that underlies children's everyday life experiences. Acquisition of executive functions, such as interpreting communication cues and the perspectives of others, is foundational to and a function of children's early social and communicative competencies. From the soccer field to the classroom, executive functions support children's strategic thinking and control of their environment. Knowing about executive functions and how this system of cognitive resources emerges in young children is important in understanding children's development. Recent research points to the importance of also considering environmental influences on the executive system. This book is unique in its focus on how experiences in children's early lives influence and are influenced by executive functions. Viewing executive functions through this broad lens is critical for professionals who intervene when children's access to executive functions is less than optimal. This book addresses a wide range of topics, including the neurological basis of executive functions in young children, the assessment of children's executive functions, theoretical and historical conceptions of executive functions, the relations between executive functions and theory of mind, multilingualism, early school transitions, and the relationship of executive functions to Autism and ADHD. This volume will be useful to professionals in applied psychology, undergraduate and graduate students, and social science and applied researchers.

A robbery victim tries to remember how the crime unfolded and who was present at the scene. A medical patient recalls the doctor saying that the pain in her side wasn't worrisome, and now that the tumor is much larger, she's suing. An investigation of insider trading hinges on someone's memory of exactly what was said at a particular business meeting. In these and countless other examples, our ability to remember our experiences is crucial for the justice system. The problem, though, is that perception and memory are fallible. How often do our eyes or memories deceive us? Is there some way to avoid these errors? Can we specify the circumstances in which perceptual or memory errors are more or less likely to occur?
Professor Daniel Reisberg tackles these questions by drawing on the available science and his personal experience training attorneys. He provides detailed pragmatic advice that will prove helpful to law enforcement, prosecutors, defenders, and anyone else who hopes to maximize the quality of the evidence available to the courts -- whether the evidence is coming from witnesses, victims, or defendants.
This book is carefully rooted in research but written in a way that will make it fully accessible to non-scientists working in the justice system. Early chapters provide an overview of the relevant science and a broad portrait of how perception and memory function. Later chapters offer practical solutions for navigating situations involving eyewitness identifications, remembered conversations, evidence obtained from interviews with children, confession evidence, and the risks of false confession.

Why do people find monkeys and apes so compelling to watch? One clear answer is that they seem so similar to us-a window into our own minds and how we have evolved over millennia. As Charles Darwin wrote in his Notebook, "He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke." Darwin recognized that behavior and cognition, and the neural architecture that support them, evolved to solve specific social and ecological problems. Defining these problems for neurobiological study, and conveying neurobiological results to ethologists and psychologists, is fundamental to an evolutionary understanding of brain and behavior. The goal of this book is to do just that. It collects, for the first time in a single book, information on primate behavior and cognition, neurobiology, and the emerging discipline of neuroethology. Here leading scientists in several fields review work ranging from primate foraging behavior to the neurophysiology of motor control, from vocal communication to the functions of the auditory cortex. The resulting synthesis of cognitive, ethological, and neurobiological approaches to primate behavior yields a richer understanding of our primate cousins that also sheds light on the evolutionary development of human behavior and cognition.

Evidence-based practice has become the benchmark for quality in healthcare and builds on rules of evidence that have been developed in psychology and other health-care disciplines over many decades. This volume aims to provide clinical neuropsychologists with a practical and approachable reference for skills in evidence-based practice to improve the scientific status of patient care. The core skills involve techniques in critical appraisal of published diagnostic-validity or treatment studies. Critical appraisal skills assist any clinician to evaluate the scientific status of any published study, to identify the patient-relevance of studies with good scientific status, and to calculate individual patient-probability estimates of diagnosis or treatment outcome to guide practice. Initial chapters in this volume review fundamental concepts of construct validity relevant to the assessment of psychopathology and cognitive abilities in neuropsychological populations. These chapters also summarize exciting contemporary development in the theories of personality and psychopathology, and cognitive ability, showing a convergence of theoretical and clinical research to guide clinical practice. Conceptual skills in interpreting construct validity of neuropsychological tests are described in detail in this volume. In addition, a non-mathematical description of the concepts of test score reliability and the neglected topic of interval estimation for individual assessment is provided. As an extension of the concepts of reliability, reliable change indexes are reviewed and the implication of impact on evidence-based practice of test scores reliability and reliable change are described to guide clinicians in their interpretation of test results on single or repeated assessments. Written by some of the foremost experts in the field of clinical neuropsychology and with practical and concrete examples throughout, this volume shows how evidence-based practice is enhanced by reference to good theory, strong construct validity, and better test score reliability.

This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.

Cognitive psychology has matured and flourished in the last half-century, as new theories, research tools, and theoretical frameworks have allowed cognitive psychologists and researchers to explore a broad array of topics. In the same vein, the depth of understanding and the methodological and theoretical sophistication have also grown in wonderful ways. Given the expanse of the field, an up-to-date and inclusive resource such as this handbook is needed for aspiring generalists who wish to read the book cover to cover, and for the many readers who are simply curious to know the current happenings in other cognition laboratories. Guided by this need, this volume's 64 chapters cover all aspects of cognition, spanning perceptual issues, attention, memory, knowledge representation, language, emotional influences, judgment, problem solving, and the study of individual differences in cognition. Additional chapters turn to the control of complex actions and the social, cultural, and developmental context of cognition. The authors include a mix of well-established influential figures and younger colleagues in order to gain an understanding of the field's forward trajectory. The volume also includes a mix of "tutorial" chapters and chapters that powerfully represent a particular research team's point of view.

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'A monumental, gripping book ... Outstanding' SUNDAY TIMES 'Noise may be the most important book I've read in more than a decade. A genuinely new idea so exceedingly important you will immediately put it into practice. A masterpiece' Angela Duckworth, author of Grit 'An absolutely brilliant investigation of a massive societal problem that has been hiding in plain sight' Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics From the world-leaders in strategic thinking and the multi-million copy bestselling authors of Thinking Fast and Slow and Nudge, the next big book to change the way you think. We like to think we make decisions based on good reasoning - and that our doctors, judges, politicians, economic forecasters and employers do too. In this groundbreaking book, three world-leading behavioural scientists come together to assess the last great fault in our collective decision-making: noise. We all make bad judgements more than we think. Noise shows us what we can do to make better ones.

For the first time in a single volume, distinguished experts address the complex issues -- issues rarely confronted in empirical studies of patients with schizophrenia -- and controversial research surrounding the assessment of negative symptoms and cognitive deficits in patients with schizophrenia.

Despite recent advances in our understanding of schizophrenia, still notably absent is consensus in assessing negative symptom treatment response. What is the most effective assessment method -- given the varying methodologies and contradictory results to date? What constitutes an adequate response? Which medication -- none is specifically indicated and licensed for negative symptom treatment -- yields the best results? What are the indications for use of this medication? Which instrument best measures negative symptom treatment response (eight rating scales are analyzed here)? Reaching consensus among clinicians and researchers alike is even more difficult because assessment is often thwarted by extrapyramidal side effects of medications, similarities to depressive symptoms, and secondary effects of psychotic experiences.

In addition to clarifying these pressing issues, Negative Symptom and Cognitive Deficit Treatment Response in Schizophrenia also discusses - The importance of measuring the experience of emotion versus the more traditional objectively measured symptoms in patients with schizophrenia, and how deficits in emotional experience may resist treatment -- even in treatment-responsive patients.

- The family as an often overlooked source of information about negative symptom improvement or worsening, and the impact of negative symptoms on patients' relatives.

- How treatment affects social functioning and subjective experience of "quality of life," and the importance of neurocognitive dysfunction in the social deficits of schizophrenia, which often persist despite significant amelioration of other symptoms.

- Specific guidelines for assessing neurocognitive treatment response. Cognitive enhancement is a major factor in improving the quality of patients' lives.

- The latest research on the neurobiology of negative symptoms, including the role of various neurotransmitter systems and brain regions in mediating negative symptom pathology. Also discussed is single vs. multiple pathophysiological processes and single treatment modality vs. distinct treatments for different aspects of negative symptoms.

- How to distinguish "pure" negative symptoms from deficit symptoms (i.e., those that persist for at least 1 year and are not secondary to factors such as depression, medication side effects, anxiety, delusions, and hallucinations), and which treatment is indicated for each.

Highlighted by patient vignettes, this in-depth guide will be welcomed by all clinicians who treat patients with schizophrenia and want to know and document whether their interventions ameliorate negative symptoms and cognitive dysfunction, and by all researchers who study schizophrenia, particularly those interested in clinical issues and treatment studies.

In this incisive new monograph one of Britain's most eminent philosophers explores the often overlooked tension between voluntariness and involuntariness in human cognition. He seeks to counter the widespread tendency for analytic epistemology to be dominated by the concept of belief. Is scientific knowledge properly conceived as being embodied, at its best, in a passive feeling of belief or in an active policy of acceptance? Should a jury's verdict declare what its members involuntarily believe or what they voluntarily accept? And should statements and assertions be presumed to express what their authors believe or what they accept? Does such a distinction between belief and acceptance help to resolve the paradoxes of self-deception and akrasia? Must people be taken to believe everything entailed by what they believe, or merely to accept everything entailed by what they accept? Through a systematic examination of these problems, the author sheds new light on issues of crucial importance in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.

In this book, Chris Eliasmith presents a new approach to understanding the neural implementation of cognition in a way that is centrally driven by biological considerations. He calls the general architecture that results from the application of this approach the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA), based on the Semantic Pointer Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, higher-level cognitive functions in biological systems are made possible by semantic pointers. These pointers are neural representations that carry partial semantic content and can be built up into the complex representational structures necessary to support cognition. The SPA architecture demonstrates how neural systems generate, compose, and control the flow of semantics pointers. Eliasmith describes in detail the theory and empirical evidence supporting the SPA, and presents several examples of its application to cognitive modeling, covering the generation of semantic pointers from visual data, the application of semantic pointers for motor control, and most important, the use of semantic pointers for representation of language-like structures, cognitive control, syntactic generalization, learning of new cognitive strategies, and language-based reasoning. He agues that the SPA provides an alternative to the dominant paradigms in cognitive science, including symbolicism, connectionism, and dynamicism.

'Motor Cognition' describes the field of motor cognition - one to which the author's contribution has been seminal. The book examines how the motor actions we perform and watch others perform play a pivotal role in the construction of the 'self' - our ability to acknowledge and recognise our own identity.

Multitasking is all around us: the office worker interrupted by a phone call, the teenager texting while driving, the salesperson chatting while entering an order. When multitasking, the mind juggles all the many tasks we're doing this second, this hour, this week, and tries to perform them together-sometimes with great ease, sometimes with great difficulty. We don't often stop to think about how exactly we accomplish these feats of multitasking great and small. How do we switch from one task to another? What types of multitasking are disruptive, and when are they most disruptive? And ultimately, how can we take advantage of the benefits of multitasking while alleviating its negative effects in our daily lives?
This book presents the theory of threaded cognition, a theory that aims to explain the multitasking mind. The theory states that multitasking behavior can be expressed as cognitive threads-independent streams of thought that weave through the mind's processing resources to produce multitasking behavior, and sometimes experience conflicts to produce multitasking interference. Grounded in the ACT-R cognitive architecture, threaded cognition incorporates computational representations and mechanisms used to simulate and predict multitasking behavior and performance.
The book describes the implications of threaded cognition theory across three traditionally disparate domains: concurrent multitasking (doing multiple tasks at once), sequential multitasking (interrupting and resuming tasks), and multitask skill acquisition (learning and practicing multiple tasks). The work stresses the importance of unifying basic and applied research by alternating between in-depth descriptions of basic research phenomena and broader treatments of phenomena in applied domains, such as driver distraction and human-computer interaction. The book also includes practical guidelines for designers of interactive systems intended for multitasking contexts.

Consciousness is a perennial source of mystification in the philosophy of mind: how can processes in the brain amount to conscious experiences? Robert Kirk uses the notion of `raw feeling' to bridge the intelligibility gap between our knowledge of ourselves as physical organisms and our knowledge of ourselves as subjects of experience; he argues that there is no need for recourse to dualism or private mental objects. The task is to understand how the truth about raw feeling could be strictly implied by narrowly physical truths. Kirk's explanation turns on an account of what it is to be a subject of conscious perceptual experience. He offers penetrating analyses of the problems of consciousness and suggests novel solutions which, unlike their rivals, can be accepted without gritting one's teeth. His sustained defence of non-reductive physicalism shows that we need not abandon hope of finding a solution to the mind-body problem.

This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.

From childhood, each of us develops our own personal set of theories and beliefs about the world in which we live. Given the impossibility of knowing about every event that can ever take place, we use cognitive short cuts to try to predict and make sense of the world around us. One of the fundamental pieces of information we use to predict future events, and make sense of past events, is 'frequency' - how often has such an event happened to us, or how often have we observed a particular event? With such information we will make inferences about the likelihood of its future appearance. We will make judgements, assess risk, or even consumer decisions, on the basis of this information. We also form associations between events that frequently occur together, and even (often incorrectly) attribute causality between one event and the other as a result of their simultaneous appearance. How is it though that we process such information? How does our brain deal with information on frequencies? How does such information influence our behaviour, beliefs, and judgements? Important new findings on this topic have come from research within both social and cognitive psychology, though until now, never brought together in a single volume. This is the first book to bring together two disparate literatures on this topic - drawing on research from both cognitive psychology and social psychology. Including contributions from world leaders in the field, this is a timely, and long overdue volume on this topic.

Simple Heuristics in a Social World invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others. The social world is a terrain where humans and other animals compete with conspecifics for myriad resources, including food, mates, and status, and where rivals grant the decision maker little time for deep thought, protracted information search, or complex calculations. Yet, the social world also encompasses domains where social animals such as humans can learn from one another and can forge alliances with one another to boost their chances of success. According to the book's thesis, the undeniable complexity of the social world does not dictate cognitive complexity as many scholars of rationality argue. Rather, it entails circumstances that render optimization impossible or computationally arduous: intractability, the existence of incommensurable considerations, and competing goals. With optimization beyond reach, less can be more. That is, heuristics--simple strategies for making decisions when time is pressing and careful deliberation an unaffordable luxury--become indispensible mental tools. As accurate as or even more accurate than complex methods when used in the appropriate social environments, these heuristics are good descriptive models of how people make many decisions and inferences, but their impressive performance also poses a normative challenge for optimization models. In short, the Homo socialis may prove to be a Homo heuristicus whose intelligence reflects ecological rather than logical rationality.

This is the last major work of Eugene N. Sokolov, Professor of Psychophysiology at Moscow State University from 1950 to 2008. It summarizes the contributions of a lifetime on the neural mechanism of consciousness. Working at the intersection of psychology, neurophysiology and mathematics, Sokolov early introduced the concept of quantifiable 'difference in neuronal activity' and 'cognitive distance' as corresponding metrics in the physical and mental models of reality. He demonstrated the power of multidimensional vector mathematics to represent the neural computations that mediate between the brain's neural model and the mind's mental model of reality.
Sokolov and colleagues showed a mathematical commonality among the neuronal mechanisms that mediate the perception of basic features of visual stimuli including color, brightness, line orientation and motion. This led to a general vector model linking perceptual and memory processes to adaptive motor mechanisms. They extended the model to encompass broader, more complex functions, such as the perception of emotions in facial expressions, semantic differences in verbal stimuli and differential executive control mechanisms. Integrating evidence from human psychophysics, animal neurophysiology and vector mathematics they developed a unified model to characterize quantitatively many complex relations between objective and subjective aspects of reality.
Sokolov's studies of neuronal mechanisms of mental phenomena led him to distinguish two categories of neurons: 'consciousness neurons' directly associated with awareness of perceptual, emotional and cognitive events, and neurons that are necessary for, but not directly involved in, conscious processes. The book integrates his findings with major themes shaping twenty-first century understanding of the brain-mind relationship. It relates the findings both to work of other Russian investigators, such as Pavlov, Luria, and Rusinov, and to work of many Western researchers, including von Bekesy, Eccles, Edelman, Ehrenstein, Grossberg, John, Koch and Crick, Ledoux, Llinas, Milner, Penfield, Penrose, Posner, and Schrodinger."

Few conversational topics can be as significant as our troubles in life, whether everyday and commonplace, or more exceptional and disturbing. In groundbreaking research conducted with John Lee at the University of Manchester UK, Gail Jefferson turned the microscope on how people talk about their troubles, not in any professional or therapeutic setting, but in their ordinary conversations with family and friends. Through recordings of interactions in which people talk about problems they're having with their children, concerns about their health, financial problems, marital and relationship difficulties (their own or other people's), examination failures, dramatic events such as burglaries or a house fire and other such troubles, Jefferson explores the interactional dynamics and complexities of introducing such topics, of how speakers sustain and elaborate their descriptions and accounts of their troubles, how participants align and affiliate with one another, and finally manage to move away from such topics. The studies Jefferson published out of that remarkable period of research have been collected together in this volume. They are as insightful and informative about how we talk about our troubles, as they are innovative in the development and application of Conversation Analysis. Gail Jefferson (1938-2008) was one of the co-founders of Conversation Analysis (CA); through her early collaboration with Harvey Sacks and in her subsequent research, she laid the foundations for what has become an immensely important interdisciplinary paradigm. She co-authored, with Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, two of the most highly cited articles ever published in Language, on turn-taking and repair. These papers were foundational, as was the transcription system that she developed and that is used by conversation analysts world-wide. Her research papers were a distinctive and original voice in the emerging micro-analysis of interaction in everyday life.

The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve presents a road map for an evolutionary psychology of the twenty-first century. It brings together theory from biology and cognitive science to show how the brain can be composed of specialized adaptations, and yet also an organ of plasticity. Although mental adaptations have typically been seen as monolithic, hard-wired components frozen in the evolutionary past, The Shape of Thought presents a new view of mental adaptations as diverse and variable, with distinct functions and evolutionary histories that shape how they develop, what information they use, and what they do with that information. The book describes how advances in evolutionary developmental biology can be applied to the brain by focusing on the design of the developmental systems that build it. Crucially, developmental systems can be plastic, designed by the process of natural selection to build adaptive phenotypes using the rich information available in our social and physical environments. This approach bridges the long-standing divide between "nativist" approaches to development, based on innateness, and "empiricist" approaches, based on learning. It shows how a view of humans as a flexible, culturally-dependent species is compatible with a complexly specialized brain, and how the nature of our flexibility can be better understood by confronting the evolved design of the organ on which that flexibility depends.