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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Cognition & cognitive psychology > General
Reading is a unique human ability that has become very pivotal for
functioning in our world today. As modern societies rely
extensively on literacy skills, and as reading disabilities have
profound personal, economic and social consequences, it is
surprising that we have a very underdeveloped scientific
understanding of the neural basis of reading and visual word
recognition in the normal brain. A better understanding of normal
reading processes could help individuals with developmental
dyslexia and other reading disabilities, and also inform our
strategies for improving early learning and carrying out effective
interventions. Neuroimaging offers a unique window on reading
through which we have achieved profound insights into its neural
correlates in both health and disease, and has also raised
important questions that have generated much scientific debate.
A new academic field, neuroeconomics, has emerged at the border of
the social and natural sciences. In Foundations of Neuroeconomic
Analysis, Paul Glimcher argues that a meaningful interdisciplinary
synthesis of the study of human and animal choice is not only
desirable, but also well underway, and so it is time to formally
develop a foundational approach for the field. He does so by laying
the philosophical and empirical groundwork and integrating the
theory of choice and valuation with the relevant physical
constraints and mechanisms.
The human visual system is particularly attuned to and remarkably
efficient at processing social cues. We can effectively "read"
others' mental and emotional states and make snap judgments about
their characters and dispositions, simply by watching them. Given
what is clearly a close relationship between vision and social
interaction, it has become increasingly clear to social
psychologists seeking to better understand the functional and
neuroanatomical mechanisms underlying social perception that vision
plays a critical role in the development and maintenance of social
exchange. Likewise, vision scientists have come to appreciate the
profound impact people, as social agents, have had on the visual
system, acknowledging just how important it is to consider the
socially adaptive functions that system evolved to perform.
The everyday capacity to understand the mind, or 'mindreading',
plays an enormous role in our ordinary lives. Shaun Nichols and
Stephen Stich provide a detailed and integrated account of the
intricate web of mental components underlying this fascinating and
multifarious skill. The imagination, they argue, is essential to
understanding others, and there are special cognitive mechanisms
for understanding oneself. The account that emerges has broad
implications for longstanding philosophical debates over the status
of folk psychology.
The cognitive revolution in the 1950s and 1960s led researchers to
view the human mind--like a computer--as an information-processing
system that encodes, represents, and stores information and is
constrained by limits on hardware (the brain) and software
(learning strategies and rules). The emergence of new behavioral,
computational, and neuroscience methodologies, has deeply expanded
psychologists' understanding of the workings of the infant, child,
and adult mind. One result is that research has focused on
mechanisms of change, over developmental time, in the
information-processing mind.
Based on a collection of chapters of leading scholars in the field, the purpose of this book is to intervene in current debates on the scientific foundation of psychological theory, methodology and research practice, and to offer an in-depth, situated and contextual understanding of psychological generalization. This book aims to contribute to a theoretical and methodological vocabulary which includes the subjective dimension of human life in psychological inquiry, and roots processes of generalization in persons' common, social, cultural and material practices of everyday living. The volume is directed to students, professors, and researchers in psychology as well as to scholars in other branches of the humanities and social science where psychology and especially subjectivity, everyday practice and the development of psychological knowledge is an issue. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars in the field of cultural psychology, critical psychology, psychology of everyday life as well as psychological methodology and qualitative studies of everyday life including the various critical undergraduate, graduate, master, and PhD programs. The book will also be of special interest for scholars working in social psychology, history of psychology, general psychology, theoretical psychology, environmental psychology and political psychology.
Several studies have suggested that education and/or literacy may protect not only against the effects of biological aging but also against the clinical manifestation of cerebral neuropathology. In clinical neuro-psychology, much debate has centered on whether the brain is more likely to degenerate as a result of overuse or underuse. There is a popular belief that an active mental life may delay the cognitive deterioration associated with normal aging. Animal studies also support the concept that environment can influence brain development. This special issue brings together data from neuro-psychology and neuro-imaging studies, and evoked potentials that analyse the impact of literacy on the functional organization of the adult brain. Discussion of how specific life experiences such as learning how to read and write can change patterns of brain activation and implications of these findings for the theory of cognitive and brain reserve are presented.
This book brings together ideas from experts in cognitive science, mathematics, and mathematics education to discuss these issues and to present research on how mathematics and its learning and teaching are evolving in the Information Age. Given the ever-broadening trends in Artificial Intelligence and the processing of information generally, the aim is to assess their implications for how math is evolving and how math should now be taught to a generation that has been reared in the Information Age. It will also look at the ever-spreading assumption that human intelligence may not be unique-an idea that dovetails with current philosophies of mind such as posthumanism and transhumanism. The role of technology in human evolution has become critical in the contemporary world. Therefore, a subgoal of this book is to illuminate how humans now use their sophisticated technologies to chart cognitive and social progress. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the chapters, this will be of interest to all kinds of readers, from mathematicians themselves working increasingly with computer scientists, to cognitive scientists who carry out research on mathematics cognition and teachers of mathematics in a classroom.
In this book, the authors Bruce J. Diamond, Amy E. Lear, and Katherine Makarec argue that there is an inner world within all of us that profoundly impacts our lives and that memories, perceptions, tastes, preferences, biases, and beliefs are encoded and expressed on an unaware, largely non-conscious level. Many aspects of our lives and actions are guided and influenced by factors about which we may know very little but which nevertheless alter the quality, substance, and trajectory of our lives, our loves, our likes, and our dislikes. Drawing on novel experimental designs and computer and imaging-based technologies, the authors demonstrate that people can react to faces and places in measurable ways, despite the fact that they may profess to having never seen or visited these faces or places. The authors show that these unaware phenomena are not isolated instances, but rather that they permeate and influence virtually every aspect of our lives.
This book discusses the development of Edward Tolman's purposive behaviourism from the 1920s to the 1950s, highlighting the tension between his references to cognitive processes and the dominant behaviourist trends. It shows how Tolman incorporated concepts from European scholars, including Egon Brunswik and the Gestalt psychologists, to justify a more purposive form of behaviourism and how the theory evolved in response to the criticisms of his contemporaries. The manuscript also discusses Tolman's political activities, culminating in his role in the California loyalty oath controversy in the 1950s. Tolman was involved in a number of progressive causes during his lifetime, activities that drew the attention of both state legislators in California and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It treats Tolman's theoretical and political activities as emanating from the same source, a desire to understand the learning process in a scientific manner and to apply these concepts to improve the human condition.
This book offers a survey of the state of the art in the field of motion sickness. It begins by describing the historical background and the current definition of motion sickness, then discusses the prevalence among individuals, along with the physiological and psychological concomitants of the disorder. It reviews the incidence of motion sickness in numerous provocative motion environments and discusses various personal factors that appear to influence this aspect. Various characteristics of provocative motion stimuli are also described, together with the results of studies conducted in the laboratory, on motion simulators and at sea. Laboratory tests that could potentially be used to assess an individual's susceptibility to motion sickness and his or her ability to adapt to motion environments are presented in detail, together with the ways in which individuals might be trained to prevent motion sickness or more effectively cope with motion environments. In closing, the book reports on the cognitive-behavioral approach developed by the author (Dobie, 1963) as well as the various desensitization programs employed in military settings, and discusses the relative effectiveness of these methods in comparison to cognitive-behavioral counseling.
This book provides a detailed example of an eye-tracking method for comparing the reading experience of a literary source text readers with readers of a translation at stylistically marked points. Drawing on principles, methods and inspiration from fields including translation studies, cognitive psychology, and language and literary studies, the author proposes an empirical method to investigate the notion of stylistic foregrounding, with 'style' understood as the distinctive manner of expression in a particular text. The book employs Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le metro (1959) and its English translation Zazie in the Metro (1960) as a case study to demonstrate the proposed methods. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of translation studies, as well as those interested in literary reception, stylistics and related fields.
A Guide to Clinical Supervision: The Supervision Pyramid provides a combined view of theory and research-based, step-by-step guidelines for conducting supervision. This book focuses on one main tool, The Supervision Pyramid, a clear and dynamic model covering multifacets of the supervisory process. It provides readers with a system of competencies within the current framework of competency based learning and evaluations within training standards. Case examples, sample forms, questions for reflection and group activities are included throughout the book. Each chapter connects the Supervision Pyramid with practical activities, while also providing a detailed summary at the end of each chapter.
This handbook offers an authoritative, one-stop reference work for the dynamic and expanding field of language learning motivation. The 32 chapters have been specially commissioned from the field's most influential researchers and writers. Together they present a compelling picture of the motivations people have for learning languages, the diverse ways we can research motivation, and the implications for promoting and sustaining learners' motivation. The first section outlines the main theoretical approaches to language learning motivation; the next section presents ways in which motivation theory has been applied in practice; the third section showcases examples of motivation research in particular contexts and with particular types of language learners; and the final section describes the exciting directions that contemporary research is taking, promising important new insights for academics and practitioners alike.
This book presents a comprehensive survey of perceptual expertise in visual object recognition, and introduces a novel collaborative model, codified as the "Perceptual Expertise Network" (PEN). This unique group effort is focused on delineating the domain-general principles of high-level visual learning that can account for how different object categories are processed and come to be associated with spatially localized activity in the primate brain. PEN's approach brings together different traditions and techniques to address questions such as how expertise develops, whether there are different kinds of experts, whether some disorders such as autism or prosopagnosia can be understood as a lack or loss of expertise, and how conceptual and perceptual information interact when experts recognize and categorize objects. The research and results that have been generated by these questions are presented here, along with a variety of other questions, background information, and extant issues that have emerged from recent studies, making this book a complete overview on the topic.
Some mental events are conscious, some are unconscious. What is the difference between the two? Uriah Kriegel offers an answer. His aim is a comprehensive theory of the features that all and only conscious mental events have. The key idea is that consciousness arises when self-awareness and world-awareness are integrated in the right way. Conscious mental events differ from unconscious ones in that, whatever else they may represent, they always also represent themselves, and do so in a very specific way. Subjective Consciousness is a fascinating new move forward towards a full understanding of the mind.
Arguments over the developmental origins of human knowledge are
ancient, founded in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes,
Hume, and Kant. They have also persisted long enough to become a
core area of inquiry in cognitive and developmental science.
Empirical contributions to these debates, however, appeared only in
the last century, when Jean Piaget offered the first viable theory
of knowledge acquisition that centered on the great themes
discussed by Kant: object, space, time, and causality. The essence
of Piaget's theory is constructivism: The building of concepts from
simpler perceptual and cognitive precursors, in particular from
experience gained through manual behaviors and observation.
Continuous Issues in Numerical Cognition: How Many or How Much re-examines the widely accepted view that there exists a core numerical system within human beings and an innate ability to perceive and count discrete quantities. This core knowledge involves the brain's intraparietal sulcus, and a deficiency in this region has traditionally been thought to be the basis for arithmetic disability. However, new research findings suggest this wide agreement needs to be examined carefully and that perception of sizes and other non-countable amounts may be the true precursors of numerical ability. This cutting-edge book examines the possibility that perception and evaluation of non-countable dimensions may be involved in the development of numerical cognition. Discussions of the above and related issues are important for the achievement of a comprehensive understanding of numerical cognition, its brain basis, development, breakdown in brain-injured individuals, and failures to master mathematical skills.
This book presents a journey into how language is put together for speaking and understanding and how it can come apart when there is injury to the brain. The goal is to provide a window into language and the brain through the lens of aphasia, a speech and language disorder resulting from brain injury in adults. This book answers the question of how the brain analyzes the pieces of language, its sounds, words, meaning, and ultimately puts them together into a unitary whole. While its major focus is on clinical, experimental, and theoretical approaches to language deficits in aphasia, it integrates this work with recent technological advances in neuroimaging to provide a state-of-the-art portrayal of language and brain function. It also shows how current computational models that share properties with those of neurons allow for a common framework to explain how the brain processes language and its parts and how it breaks down according to these principles. Consideration will also be given to whether language can recover after brain injury or when areas of the brain recruited for speaking, understanding, or reading are deprived of input, as seen with people who are deaf or blind. No prior knowledge of linguistics, psychology, computer science, or neuroscience is assumed. The informal style of this book makes it accessible to anyone with an interest in the complexity and beauty of language and who wants to understand how it is put together, how it comes apart, and how language maps on to the brain.
The study of mental imagery has been a central concern of modern psychology, but most of what we know concerns visual imagery. A number of researchers, however, have recently begun to explore auditory imagery; this foundation-level volume presents their work. The topics covered are diverse, a reflection of the fact that auditory imagery seems relevant to numerous research domains -- from the ordinary memory rehearsal of undergraduates to the delusional voices of schizophrenics, from music imagery to imagery for speech. The chapters also address the parallels (and contrasts) between visual and auditory imagery, the relations between "inner speech" and overt speech, and between the "inner ear" and actual hearing. This book provides a valuable resource for students in many areas: imagery, working memory, music, speech, auditory perception, schizophrenia, or deafness.
A critical examination of the advancing intellectual developments in artificial intelligence and evaluation of their salient philosophical and psychological implications. This book contains a wealth of research and theory across major domains of cognition that support the broad intellectual artificial intelligence objective of developing a structured and detailed unified science of human and computational intelligence. The significant philosophical and psychological implications that derive from pursuing an extraordinary intellectual objective of developing an abstract science of intelligence supported by specific theory and research will be of special interest to creative scholars in the disciplines of the sciences of cognition. By considering philosophical and psychological implications derived directly from current theory and research, this book is distinguished from speculative books lacking in intellectual grounding.
Trust in Human-Robot Interaction addresses the gamut of factors that influence trust of robotic systems. The book presents the theory, fundamentals, techniques and diverse applications of the behavioral, cognitive and neural mechanisms of trust in human-robot interaction, covering topics like individual differences, transparency, communication, physical design, privacy and ethics. |
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