Visual information processing in humans with intellectual disabilities and in animals is presented, for conceptual and methodological reasons. Much of the evolutionary path of higher primate species has involved the development of sophisticated visual systems that interact with complex, higher-order cognitive processes. Key questions in cognitive science address the manner in which the environment is represented by the organism, and thus relate to how knowledge about the world is gleaned, with implications for theories of action and decision making. Finally, it has become apparent that the distinction between perceptual and cognitive processes is not always a clear one, and that these processes interact in critical ways in underlying complex behavioral repertoires.

Consistent with the emphasis in this series on individual differences, both typical and atypical development are explored here. Philosophical approaches to visualism are also presented. Chapters have import both for basic science and for the development of applications.

In order to bridge the gap between artificial and synthetic intelligence, we must first understand our own intelligence. 'What is intelligence?' might appear as a simple question, but many great minds have agreed that there is no singular answer. Unlocking Consciousness attempts to examine this central question through exploring the convergence of computing, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience and biogenetics.The book is the first of its kind to compare comprehensive definitions of both information and intelligence, an essential component to the advancement of computing into the realms of artificial intelligence. In examining explanations for intelligence, consciousness, memory and meaning from the perspective of a computer scientist, it offers routes that can be taken to augment natural and artificial intelligence, improving our own individual abilities, and even considering the potential for creating a prosthetic brain.Unlocking Consciousness demonstrates that understanding intelligence is not just for the benefit of computer scientists, it is also of great value to those working in evolutionary, molecular and systems biology, cognitive neuroscience, genetics and biotechnology. In unlocking the secrets of intelligence and laying out the methods of which information is structured and processed, we can unlock a completely new theory of consciousness.For additional published articles and appendices referenced in this title, readers can visit www.brainmindforum.org/ for further information.

Thinking and Problem-Solving presents a comprehensive and up-to-date review of literature on cognition, reasoning, intelligence, and other formative areas specific to this field. Written for advanced undergraduates, researchers, and academics, this volume is a necessary reference for beginning and established investigators in cognitive and educational psychology.
Thinking and Problem-Solving provides insight into questions such as: how do people solve complex problems in mathematics and everyday life? How do we generate new ideas? How do we piece together clues to solve a mystery, categorize novel events, and teach others to do the same?
Key Features
* Provides a comprehensive literature review
* Covers both historical and contemporary approaches
* Organized for ease of use and reference
* Chapters authored by leading scholars

The second book in a new seies, Self Perception brings together contemporary perspectives on individual differences in psychology. Drawing upon an international field of established and new researchers, the series presents both theoretical and applied work looking at individual difference in human performance. The re-appraisal of self perception is considered as part of the development of new thinking in the theory of self-reference. This includes models of self from the United States and the United Kingdom. The book goes on to explore recent research from around the globe. Not only are studies from Australia, Norway, and the United States examined but research from Greece and Kuwait is also explored. Varied topics are covered, including the effects of gender, self-esteem, and pupil self-perception in the academic context. Set within the framework of a conceptual synthesis of the research, the book offers a contemporary review of current thinking in the field. The contributors provide recent, relevant, and alternative perspectives for psychologists and applied scientists.

Paying attention is something we are all familiar with and often take for granted, yet the nature of the operations involved in paying attention is one of the most profound mysteries of the brain. This book contains a rich, interdisciplinary collection of articles by some of the pioneers of contemporary research on attention. Central themes include how attention is moved within the visual field; attention's role during visual search, and the inhibition of these search processes; how attentional processing changes as continued practice leads to automatic performance; how visual and auditory attentional processing may be linked; and recent advances in functional neuro-imaging and how they have been used to study the brain's attentional network

Creating a link between a number of natural science and life science disciplines, the emerging field of cognitive informatics presents a transdisciplinary approach to the internal information processing mechanisms and processes of the brain and natural intelligence.""Novel Approaches in Cognitive Informatics and Natural Intelligence"" penetrates the academic field to offer the latest advancements in cognitive informatics and natural intelligence. This book covers the five areas of cognitive informatics, natural intelligence, autonomic computing, knowledge science, and relevant development, to provide researchers, academicians, students, and practitioners with a ready reference to the latest findings.

This ambitious multidisciplinary volume surveys the science, forensics, politics, and ethics involved in responding to missing persons cases. International experts across the physical and social sciences offer data, case examples, and insights on best practices, new methods, and emerging specialties that may be employed in investigations. Topics such as secondary victimization, privacy issues, DNA identification, and the challenges of finding victims of war and genocide highlight the uncertainties and complexities surrounding these cases as well as possibilities for location and recovery. This diverse presentation will assist professionals in accessing new ideas, collaborating with colleagues, and handling missing persons cases with greater efficiency-and potentially greater certainty. Among the Handbook's topics: *A profile of missing persons: some key findings for police officers. *Missing persons investigations and identification: issues of scale, infrastructure, and political will. *Pregnancy and parenting among runaway and homeless young women. *Estimating the appearance of the missing: forensic age progression in the search for missing persons. *The use of trace evidence in missing persons investigations. *The Investigation of historic missing persons cases: genocide and "conflict time" human rights abuses. The depth and scope of its expertise make the Handbook of Missing Persons useful for criminal justice and forensic professionals, health care and mental health professionals, social scientists, legal professionals, policy leaders, community leaders, and military personnel, as well as for the general public.

This book is about computational models of reading, or models that explain (and often simulate) the mental processes that allow us to convert the marks on a printed page into the representations that allow us to understand the contents of what we are reading. Computational Models of Reading assumes no prior knowledge of the topic and is intended for psychologists, linguists, and educators who are interested in gaining a better understanding of what happens in the mind during reading. Erik D. Reichle includes introductory chapters on reading research and computational modelling, and the "core" chapters of the book review both important empirical findings and the models designed to explain those findings within four domains of reading research: word identification, sentence processing, discourse representation, and eye-movement control (which involves coordinating word, sentence, and discourse processing with the perceptual, cognitive, and motoric systems responsible for vision, attention, and eye movements). The final chapter of the book describes a new integrative model of reading, UEber-Reader, and several simulations using the models that demonstrate how it explains several key reading phenomena.

The book presents a new theory of personality, referred to as cognitive-experiential theory (CET). Currently there are a variety of personality theories that seem irreconcilable with each other. CET is integrative of all other major personality theories. This integration is accomplished by expanding upon current basic assumptions, including the assumption that all higher-order animals automatically construct an implicit theory of reality that is necessary for adapting to their environments and that is therefore inherently reinforcing. The system that accomplishes this is referred to as the experiential system, as it is an empirical system that adapts by automatically learning from experience. Because it operates without requiring conscious awareness it can be regarded as an adaptive unconscious system, however, this book reveals that the experiential system is not identical with an unconscious adaptive system, and is superior to that construct in several important respects. Humans, of course, also uniquely operate with a conscious, reasoning system, referred to in CET as a rational system. This book demonstrates how these two systems operate in parallel and influence each other in important ways. For example, the influence of the experiential on the rational system can account for why the human species, despite its outstanding intelligence in solving impersonal problems, which are mainly in the domain of the rational system, often think and behave unintelligently and destructively in solving interpersonal problems, which are primarily in the domain of the experiential system. Yet, neither system is generally superior to the other, and the book discusses how each system is superior in uniquely important ways.

This groundbreaking interdisciplinary Handbook showcases the latest intuition research, integrated in a framework that reconciles various views on what intuition is and how it works. The internationally renowned group of contributors presents their findings in five areas. Part I explores different facets of the intuiting process and its outcome, the role of consciousness and affect, and alternate ways of capturing intuition. Part II deals with its function in expertise, strategy, entrepreneurship, and ethics. Part III outlines intuitive decision making in critical occupations, legal profession, medicine, film and wine industry, and teaching. Part IV pushes the boundaries of our current understanding by exploring the possibility of non-local intuition, based on the principles of quantum holography. Part V investigates new techniques for developing intuitive skills. This cutting-edge, comprehensive Handbook will prove essential for academics and research students of social sciences, particularly management, psychology, sociology, entrepreneurship, leadership, team dynamics, HR and training. It will be also an invaluable resource for industry professionals searching for soft-core methods to increase productivity and creativity/innovation, to improve leadership and organizational climate, or to adopt new staff training and development methods. Contributors: A. Antonietti, B.T. Bakken, C. Betsch, R.T. Bradley, L.A. Burke, J.-F. Coget, E. Dane, A. Dijksterhuis, W. Duggan, I.D. Ebert, S. Epstein, A. Glockner, B. Graf, L.K. Gundry, J.R. Guzak, T. Haerem, M.B. Hargrove, C. Harteis, G.P. Hodgkinson, P. Iannello, K.-P. Ittner, J.R. Kickul, G. Klein, C. Kugler, C. Kuhnle, J. Langan-Fox, M. Mason, B. Morgenthaler, J.E. Pretz, D. Radin, G. Roth, E. Sadler-Smith, M. Sinclair, M. Strick, D.E. Tomasino, V. Vranic

Ruth Millikan is well known for having developed a strikingly original way for philosophers to seek understanding of mind and language, which she sees as biological phenomena. She now draws together a series of groundbreaking essays which set out her approach to language. Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by prescriptive normative rules. Millikan offers a fundamentally different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, comparing them to biological norms that emerge from natural selection. This yields novel and quite radical consequences for our understanding of the nature of public linguistic meaning, the process of language understanding, how children learn language, and the semantics/pragmatics distinction.

Living Your Purpose walks readers through the five principles at the heart of NLP. Neurolinguistic programming (NLP) is the study of how people make change on purpose. In applying NLP to your own life, you simply assume that you have what you need and the problem is to find it. Whether you are in pain, confused, stuck or in pursuit of a goal that seems impossible, there is only one problem. You have not yet made a connection between that situation and the resources that will lead to a satisfying outcome. This is a book for everyone who has ever wished NLP could be clear and practical and rooted in evidence that what it teaches really works. Since 2003, Linda has been one of Canada's leading developers of NLP. Through creativity, interaction with related models, and study of the leading edge, Linda develops training that accelerates learning and transformation.

From the Foreword:
"In this book Joscha Bach introduces Dietrich Dorner's PSI architecture and Joscha's implementation of the MicroPSI architecture. These architectures and their implementation have several lessons for other architectures and models. Most notably, the PSI architecture includes drives and thus directly addresses questions of emotional behavior. An architecture including drives helps clarify how emotions could arise. It also changes the way that the architecture works on a fundamental level, providing an architecture more suited for behaving autonomously in a simulated world. PSI includes three types of drives, physiological (e.g., hunger), social (i.e., affiliation needs), and cognitive (i.e., reduction of uncertainty and expression of competency). These drives routinely influence goal formation and knowledge selection and application. The resulting architecture generates new kinds of behaviors, including context dependent memories, socially motivated behavior, and internally motivated task switching. This architecture illustrates how emotions and physical drives can be included in an embodied cognitive architecture.
The PSI architecture, while including perceptual, motor, learning, and cognitive processing components, also includes several novel knowledge representations: temporal structures, spatial memories, and several new information processing mechanisms and behaviors, including progress through types of knowledge sources when problem solving (the Rasmussen ladder), and knowledge-based hierarchical active vision. These mechanisms and representations suggest ways for making other architectures more realistic, more accurate, and easier to use.
The architecture is demonstrated in the Island simulated environment. While it may look like a simple game, it was carefully designed to allow multiple tasks to be pursued and provides ways to satisfy the multiple drives. It would be useful in its own right for developing other architectures interested in multi-tasking, long-term learning, social interaction, embodied architectures, and related aspects of behavior that arise in a complex but tractable real-time environment.
The resulting models are not presented as validated cognitive models, but as theoretical explorations in the space of architectures for generating behavior. The sweep of the architecture can thus be larger-it presents a new cognitive architecture attempting to provide a unified theory of cognition. It attempts to cover perhaps the largest number of phenomena to date. This is not a typical cognitive modeling work, but one that I believe that we can learn much from."
--Frank E. Ritter, Series Editor

Although computational models of cognition have become very popular, these models are relatively limited in their coverage of cognition-- they usually only emphasize problem solving and reasoning, or treat perception and motivation as isolated modules. The first architecture to cover cognition more broadly is PSI theory, developed by Dietrich Dorner. By integrating motivation and emotion with perception and reasoning, and including grounded neuro-symbolic representations, PSI contributes significantly to an integrated understanding of the mind. It provides a conceptual framework that highlights the relationships between perception and memory, language and mental representation, reasoning and motivation, emotion and cognition, autonomy and social behavior. It is, however, unfortunate that PSI's origin in psychology, its methodology, and its lack of documentation have limited its impact. The proposed book adapts Psi theory to cognitive science and artificial intelligence, by elucidating both its theoretical and technical frameworks, and clarifying its contribution to how we have come to understand cognition."

G. William Domhoff presents a new neurocognitive theory of dreams in his book The Emergence of Dreaming. His theory stresses the similarities between dreaming and drifting waking thought, based on laboratory and non-laboratory studies that show as many as 70 to 80 percent of dreams are dramatized enactments of significant waking personal concerns about the past, present, and future. Domhoff discusses a developmental dimension of dreaming based on the unexpected laboratory discovery that young children dream infrequently and with less complexity until ages 9-11-supported by new findings with children who are awake that demonstrate the gradual emergence of cognitive skills necessary for dreaming. Domhoff's theory locates the neural substrate for dreaming in the same brain network now known to be most active during mind-wandering, and explains the transition into dreaming. Various strands of evidence lead to the conclusion that dreaming does not have any adaptive function, and is best viewed as an accidental by-product of adaptive waking cognitive abilities. However, cross-cultural and historical studies reveal that human inventiveness has made dreams an essential part of healing and religious ceremonies in many societies. Three chapters present detailed critiques of other current theories of dreams. The final chapter suggests how new and better studies of dreaming and its neurocognitive basis can be carried out using recent technological developments in both communications (e.g., smartphone apps) and neuroimaging (e.g., near infrared spectroscopy). As one of the first empirical and scientific treatments on dream research, The Emergence of Dreaming will be of interest to psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, sleep researchers, and psychiatrists.

The last decade has seen a major growth in research on how memory is used in everyday life. This volume represents a reaction to traditional laboratory-bound studies of the first half of the century which sought to identify the fundamental principles of learning and memory through the use of materials and methods totally divorced from the real world. The new wave of memory research has had considerable success in charting how memory develops, the role it plays in educational and social skills and the impact of memory impairment on mental life. The current volume consists of authoritative reviews of this emerging area linked to comment and criticism from major researchers in the field.

Contrasted, probably for the first time, are two major styles of research in applied memory research: The "naturalistic approach," which has sought to study memory in everyday environments, using actual experiences from people's lives as the raw data from which to derive more general principles, and the "applied cognitive approach," whereby theories and methods are developed using orthodox laboratory techniques which are then validated by applying them directly to real phenomena. This is one of the few books to bring together evidence across the very wide spectrum of humdrum activity that constitutes the everyday uses of memory.

This book provides a review of the latest research on emotion in engineering, with a particular focus on design and manufacturing. Topics include experience, happiness, cognitive science, neuroscience, additive manufacturing, universal design, branding, teamwork. Throughout the book, the emotions of the end users of engineering products are discussed, as well as the perspective of the expert. The book provides researchers, students, and practicing engineers with an opportunity to examine research and practice in engineering from a different perspective, and offers pointers to how to collaborate with people from other fields to help achieve a more connected society.

This volume has 41 chapters written to honor the 100th birthday of Mario Bunge. It celebrates the work of this influential Argentine/Canadian physicist and philosopher. Contributions show the value of Bunge's science-informed philosophy and his systematic approach to philosophical problems. The chapters explore the exceptionally wide spectrum of Bunge's contributions to: metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, medical philosophy, and education. The contributors include scholars from 16 countries. Bunge combines ontological realism with epistemological fallibilism. He believes that science provides the best and most warranted knowledge of the natural and social world, and that such knowledge is the only sound basis for moral decision making and social and political reform. Bunge argues for the unity of knowledge. In his eyes, science and philosophy constitute a fruitful and necessary partnership. Readers will discover the wisdom of this approach and will gain insight into the utility of cross-disciplinary scholarship. This anthology will appeal to researchers, students, and teachers in philosophy of science, social science, and liberal education programmes. 1. Introduction Section I. An Academic Vocation (3 chapters) Section II. Philosophy (12 chapters) Section III. Physics and Philosophy of Physics (4 chapters) Section IV. Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind (2 chapters) Section V. Sociology and Social Theory (4 chapters) Section VI. Ethics and Political Philosophy (3 chapters) Section VII. Biology and Philosophy of Biology (3 chapters) Section VIII. Mathematics (3 chapters) Section IX. Education (2 chapters) Section X. Varia (3 chapters) Section XI. Bibliography

In this revolutionary work, the author sets the stage for the science of
the 21st Century, pursuing an unprecedented synthesis of fields previously
considered unrelated. Beginning with simple classical concepts, he ends
with a complex multidisciplinary theory requiring a high level of
abstraction. The work progresses across the sciences in several
multidisciplinary directions: Mathematical logic, fundamental physics,
computer science and the theory of intelligence. Extraordinarily enough,
the author breaks new ground in all these fields.

In the field of
fundamental physics the author reaches the revolutionary conclusion that
physics can be viewed and studied as logic in a fundamental sense, as
compared with Einstein's view of physics as space-time geometry. This opens
new, exciting prospects for the study of fundamental interactions. A
formulation of logic in terms of matrix operators and logic vector spaces
allows the author to tackle for the first time the intractable problem of
cognition in a scientific manner. In the same way as the findings of
Heisenberg and Dirac in the 1930s provided a conceptual and mathematical
foundation for quantum physics, matrix operator logic supports an important
breakthrough in the study of the physics of the mind, which is interpreted
as a fractal of quantum mechanics. Introducing a concept of logic quantum
numbers, the author concludes that the problem of logic and the
intelligence code in general can be effectively formulated as eigenvalue
problems similar to those of theoretical physics. With this important leap
forward in the study of the mechanism of mind, the author concludes that
the latter cannot be fully understood either within classical or quantum
notions. A higher-order covariant theory is required to accommodate the
fundamental effect of high-level intelligence. The landmark results
obtained by the author will have implications and repercussions for the
very foundations of science as a whole. Moreover, Stern's Matrix Logic is
suitable for a broad spectrum of practical applications in contemporary
technologies.

This book scrutinizes the practice of sailing and its relation to philosophy of mind. Sailing brings about a peculiar human-artifact interaction which can lead to unexplored research paths. The idea behind this collection is that this interaction is better scrutinized by sailor scientists/philosophers to open up new possible pathways in research. Fascinating theoretical breakthroughs have been provided by observing sailing practices with the most well-known being Hutchins' introduction in cognitive science of the concept of "distributed cognition." However, in times past, sailing has both fueled philosophical metaphors, from Theseus' ship to Plato's image of the intellect as the boatperson of the soul, and inspired philosophers' views (as happened to Herder during a stormy sea trip). The ecology of sailing is highly constrained: sailboats move at the surface between a compressible fluid and an uncompressible fluid. Wind originates in certain specific circumstances. Only certain sequences of actions are possible to take advantage of this ecology. The ontology of sailing is both of the boat and of the ocean/wind system. It highlights the fact that sailboats have been for centuries arguably the most complex technological artifacts in each culture that developed them, precisely because the environment they are engaging is so peculiar and demanding - almost the precise dual of Sapiens' adaptive environment. This volume will appeal to philosophers of mind, cognitive psychologists, and marine professionals.

This collection weitten by leading figures in cognitive science includes their lively debates with Dartnall about his call for a new epistemology, an alternative to the standard representational story in cognitive science. Dartnall aims to show that new epistemology is already with us in some leading-edge models of human creativity. Such an epistemology steers a middle road between the representationism of classical cognitive science and a radical anti-representationism that denies the existence or importance of representations.

Dartnall, who debates contributors at each chapter's end, believes that creativity inheres--not only in big ticket items such as plays, poems, or sonatas--but in our ability to produce cognitive content at all, so that representations are the creative products of our knowledge, rather than its passive carriers.