This book provides a multidisciplinary view into how individuals and groups interact with the information environments that surround them. The book discusses how informational environments shape our daily lives, and how digital technologies can improve the ways in which people make use of informational environments. It presents the research and outcomes of a seven-year multidisciplinary research initiative, the Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus Tubingen Informational Environments, jointly conducted by the Leibniz-Institut fur Wissensmedien (IWM) and the Eberhard Karls Universitat Tubingen. Book chapters from leading international experts in psychology, education, computer science, sociology, and medicine provide a multi-layered and multidisciplinary view on how the interplay between individuals and their informational environments unfolds. Featured topics include: Managing obesity prevention using digital media. Using digital media to assess and promote school teacher competence. Informational environments and their effect on college student dropout. Web-Platforms for game-based learning of orthography and numeracy. How to design adaptive information environments to support self-regulated learning with multimedia. Informational Environments will be of interest to advanced undergraduate students, postgraduate students, researchers and practitioners in various fields of educational psychology, social psychology, education, computer science, communication science, sociology, and medicine.

The sciences philosophy, psychology and neuroscience share the basis that all refer to the human being. Therefore, an interdisciplinary collaboration would be desirable. The exchange of criticism is an essential requirement for interdisciplinary collaboration. Criticism must be heard and - if possible - considered. Indeed, criticism can be valid or unwarranted. However, whether criticism is unwarranted can only emerge from discussion and conversation. In the discussion of cognitive neuroscience, some criticism can easily be considered (such as the mereological fallacy that represents that talking about the person is substituted with talking bout the brain). Another issue for an interdisciplinary discussion of cognitive neuroscience is the interpretation of the readiness potential including re-considering Benjamin Libet's classic experiments. Additionally, a critical discussion on cognitive neuroscience must address ethical questions, such as the possibility of the abuse of neuroscientific insight.

Several Python programming books feature tools designed for experimental psychologists. What sets this book apart is its focus on eye-tracking. Eye-tracking is a widely used research technique in psychology and neuroscience labs. Research grade eye-trackers are typically faster, more accurate, and of course, more expensive than the ones seen in consumer goods or usability labs. Not surprisingly, a successful eye-tracking study usually requires sophisticated computer programming. Easy syntax and flexibility make Python a perfect choice for this task, especially for psychology researchers with little or no computer programming experience. This book offers detailed coverage of the Pylink library, a Python interface for the gold standard EyeLink (R) eye-trackers, with many step-by-step example scripts. This book is a useful reference for eye-tracking researchers, but you can also use it as a textbook for graduate-level programming courses.

This volume presents the results of psycholinguistic research into various aspects of the grammar of quantification. The investigations involve children and adults, speakers of different languages, using a variety of experimental paradigms. A shared aspect of the studies is that they present their experimental results as evidence evaluating linguistic theories of quantification. Topics discussed include the interpretation of universal, comparative, and superlative quantifiers, quantifier spreading, scope interaction between pairs of quantifiers and between quantifiers and wh-phrases, distributivity and cumulativity, the interaction of quantifier interpretation with information structure, the disambiguating role of prosody, the functional overlap between universal quantification and perfectivity, and much more. The focus on experimental evidence makes this book essential reading for linguists (syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists), psycholinguists and psychologists interested in quantification.

This book frames our biological and psychological capacity to make friends as an evolved ability, comparing friendship to other evolved traits of human beings such as walking upright on two legs, having opposable thumbs and a prominent chin, and possessing the capacity for speech and complex abstract reasoning. Professor John Terrell investigates how the human brain has evolved to perform two functions essential to friendship that, at first glance, appear to be at odds with one another: remaking the outside world to suit our collective needs, and escaping into our own inner thoughts and imagining how things might and ought to be. We must all deal with our species' hereditary legacy-that we are social animals who need to include others in our lives for our biological and psychological survival. Yet we are also able to exercise the cognitive freedom to detach from the adaptive realities and demands of life. These thought patterns have important consequences for how we understand aggression and cooperation. Terrell claims that conflict is best understood in terms of friendship-as challenges that emerge when we are forced to reconcile the inner, private worlds of our imaginations with the experienced realities of our daily lives and each other.

This book contains a number of chapters on the control and execution of skilled movements, as well as more general chapters on theoretical issues in skilled performance. The contributors have summarised their most recent research, and general themes and issues are presented in discussion chapters at the end of each section, thus providing a good general summary of the kind of research and theoretical frameworks developing in this area. The first section is concerned with the theoretical issues of programming and co-ordination. Issues raised in the second section are basic to much of the research reviewed in the volume. This section summarises the various theoretical positions in the recent debates on the role of cognitive processes in motor control and the usefulness of the ``psychomotor'' approach, and contains chapters based on individual papers which present relevant empirical findings. The third section deals with the learning and performance of skilled movements, containing papers with practical implications for everyday skills. The final section contains chapters on cognitive processes in skilled performance.

This volume offers a look at the fundamental issues of present and future AI, especially from cognitive science, computer science, neuroscience and philosophy. This work examines the conditions for artificial intelligence, how these relate to the conditions for intelligence in humans and other natural agents, as well as ethical and societal problems that artificial intelligence raises or will raise. The key issues this volume investigates include the relation of AI and cognitive science, ethics of AI and robotics, brain emulation and simulation, hybrid systems and cyborgs, intelligence and intelligence testing, interactive systems, multi-agent systems, and super intelligence. Based on the 2nd conference on "Theory and Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence" held in Oxford, the volume includes prominent researchers within the field from around the world.

The author describes the structure and function of the human brain as it pertains to memory.

Eugene J. Meehan's immediate purpose in this study is to explain the essentials of a promising approach to measuring and improving cognitive performance, and to summarize the exceptional results obtained thus far from years of experimental applications in the United States and abroad. The approach depends upon two primary constructs: first, a concept labeled cognitive skill or cognitive competence, which is identified with the individual's capacity to acquire, assess, and apply knowledge; and second, a theory of knowledge that is limited in scope but focused on the development and use of knowledge in the conduct of human affairs. Meehan's extended purpose, the reason for being concerned with measuring and improving cognitive competence, is the glaring inadequacy of intellectual performance of those educated in the United States and elsewhere, compared to current needs. This study details the strong theoretical base, examines the process of testing cognitive skill, and investigates the relationship between cognitive skill and real-world achievement. Meehan argues that a useful measure of the concept of cognitive skill testing can be created and stabilized, and that the skills included can be improved selectively and systematically. The book concludes with a discussion of the principal areas of uncertainty, including the long-range effects of cognitive training and the factors that influence retention--particularly in societies that maintain a generally anti-intellectual environment, or where methodological and analytical criticism is not a regular part of everyday practice, even among the well-educated. The significant research, testing, and results which show actual progress in improving educational practice as detailed in this book will interest methodologists, educators, and social scientists.

Now established as an effective tool in the instructional process, multimedia has penetrated educational systems at almost every level of study. In their quest to maximize educational outcomes and identify best practices, multimedia researchers are now expanding their examinations to extend towards the cognitive functionality of multimedia.""Cognitive Effects of Multimedia Learning"" identifies the role and function of multimedia in learning through a collection of research studies focusing on cognitive functionality. An advanced collection of critical theories and practices, this much needed contribution to the research is an essential holding for academic libraries, and will benefit researchers, practitioners and students in basic and applied fields ranging from education to cognitive sciences.

Creativity and design creativity in particular are being recognized as playing an increasing role in the social and economic wellbeing of a society. As a consequence creativity is becoming a focus of research. However, much of this burgeoning research is distributed across multiple disciplines that normally do not intersect with each other and researchers in one discipline are often unaware of related research in another discipline. This volume brings together contributions from design science, computer science, cognitive science and neuroscience on studying visual and spatial reasoning applicable to design creativity. The book is the result of a unique NSF-funded workshop held in Aix-en-Provence, France. The aim of the workshop and the resulting volume was to allow researchers in disparate disciplines to be exposed to the other's research, research methods and research results within the context of design creativity. Fifteen of the papers presented and discussed at the workshop are contained in this volume. The contributors come from Germany, Israel, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, UK and USA, indicating the international spread of the research presented in this volume.

This eminently useful guide presents an up-to-date framework for Rational-Emotive Cognitive-Behavioral Coaching (RE-CBC), from basic concepts, techniques, and applications to evidence of how and why this versatile method works. It details how RE-CBC synthesizes the rational thinking, cognitive disputing, and semantic training traditions of RE and CB therapies into coaching strategies for solving problems or furthering personal development. The book's sections on process and techniques demonstrate the flexibility of the method as used in a variety of settings toward a gamut of purposes, illustrating Albert Ellis' central goal of long-term happiness through rational living. And specialized chapters offer applications of RE-CBC to familiar coaching domains (life, health, family, motivation) as well as to the complex worlds of business and organizations. Included in the coverage: * Coaching for rational living: rational-emotive, cognitive-behavioral perspectives. * Psychological blockers to successful coaching outcomes. * Enhancing positive psychology coaching practice. * Assessment, case formulation, and intervention models. * A step-based framework for coaching practice. * Plus: applications of Rational-Emotive Cognitive-Behavioral Coaching, including motivational, parent/family, workplace stress management, organizational change, school success, and sports performance. Coaching for Rational Living is a robust practice-building resource for coaches, psychologists, counselors, and health professionals, particularly mental health practitioners who use rational-emotive and cognitive-behavioral therapy and coaching.

This book discusses how scientific and other types of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important or creative changes in theories and concepts. It includes revised contributions presented during the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR'015), held on June 25-27 in Sestri Levante, Italy. The book is divided into three main parts, the first of which focuses on models, reasoning and representation. It highlights key theoretical concepts from an applied perspective, addressing issues concerning information visualization, experimental methods and design. The second part goes a step further, examining abduction, problem solving and reasoning. The respective contributions analyze different types of reasoning, discussing various concepts of inference and creativity and their relationship with experimental data. In turn, the third part reports on a number of historical, epistemological and technological issues. By analyzing possible contradictions in modern research and describing representative case studies in experimental research, this part aims at fostering new discussions and stimulating new ideas. All in all, the book provides researchers and graduate students in the field of applied philosophy, epistemology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence alike with an authoritative snapshot of current theories and applications of model-based reasoning.

The present volume is a ground-breaking and agenda-setting investigation of the psychology of self-forgiveness. It brings together the work of expert clinicians and researchers working within the field, to address questions such as: Why is self-forgiveness so difficult? What contexts and psychological experiences give rise to the need for self-forgiveness? What approaches can therapists use to help people process difficult experiences that elicit guilt, shame and self-condemnation? How can people work through their own failures and transgressions? Assembling current theories and findings, this unique resource reviews and advances our understanding of self-forgiveness, and its potentially critical function in interpersonal relationships and individual emotional and physical health. The editors begin by exploring the nature of self-forgiveness. They consider its processes, causes, and effects, how it may be measured, and its potential benefits to theory and psychotherapy. Expert clinicians and researchers then examine self-forgiveness in its many facets; as a response to guilt and shame, a step toward processing transgressions, a means of reducing anxiety, and an essential component of, or, under some circumstances a barrier to, psychotherapeutic intervention. Contributors also address self-forgiveness as applied to diverse psychosocial contexts such as addiction and recovery, couples and families, healthy aging, the workplace, and the military. Among the topics in the Handbook: An evolutionary approach to shame-based self-criticism, self-forgiveness and compassion. Working through psychological needs following transgressions to arrive at self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness and health: a stress-and-coping model. Self-forgiveness and personal and relational well-being. Self-directed intervention to promote self-forgiveness. Understanding the role of forgiving the self in the act of hurting oneself. The Handbook of the Psychology of Self-Forgiveness serves many healing professionals. It covers a wide range of problems for which individuals often seek help from counselors, clergy, social workers, psychologists and physicians. Research psychologists, philosophers, and sociologists studying self-forgiveness will also find it an essential handbook that draws together the advances made over the past several decades, and identifies important directions for the road ahead.

How do people perceive time? This book presents a wealth of contemporary and classical research, including some of the history and philosophy of time perception. Influential internal clock-based models of time perception receive an in-depth but non-technical introduction and discussion. The role of cognition and emotion in perceiving time is also explored, as well as questions derived from time experience in daily life, such as why time seems to pass more quickly in one situation rather than another. Classical and modern research on timing in children is reviewed, as well as work on time perception and time experience in older people. Leading recent models of animal timing are also discussed in a non-mathematical way.

Cognitive informatics is a multidisciplinary field that acts as the bridge between natural science and information science. Specifically, it investigates the potential applications of information processing and natural intelligence to science and engineering disciplines. Transdisciplinary Advancements in Cognitive Mechanisms and Human Information Processing examines innovative research in the emerging, multidisciplinary field of cognitive informatics. Researchers, practitioners and students can benefit from discussions of the connections between natural science and informatics that are investigated in this fundamental collection of cognitive informatics research. This book provides information on the interrelation of the multidisciplinary research area of Cognitive Informatics and the transdisciplinary study of Natural Intelligence.

Spatial Neglect is one of the few areas in Neuropsychology where clinicians, psychologists and animal experimenters have succeeded in adopting a common language. The result of interaction between these three approaches has been some important new advances, which are presented in this volume. Apart from its clinical significance in neuropsychology, Spatial Neglect raises important questions in the field of behavioral neurosciences. In this volume, three aspects are examined: a) normal subjects, where new findings on spatial behavior are described. b) brain-lesioned subjects, where the classical studies on neglect are reconsidered in the light of new findings. c) animals, where new experimental situations allow a deeper understanding of the neural substrate.

This book brings together a variety of contemporary approaches to learning that by and large follow the structuralist path to understand learning, a path both ecological and dynamic. The book views the learning processes as they take place in the course of personenvironment relationships.

Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference extends Wayne Davis's groundbreaking work on the foundations of semantics. Davis revives the classical doctrine that meaning consists in the expression of ideas, and advances the expression theory by showing how it can account for standard proper names, and the distinctive way their meaning determines their reference. He also shows how the theory can handle interjections, syncategorematic terms, conventional implicatures, and other cases long seen as difficult for both ideational and referential theories. The expression theory is founded on the fact that thoughts are event types with a constituent structure, and that thinking is a fundamental propositional attitude, distinct from belief and desire. Thought parts ('ideas' or 'concepts') are distinguished from both sensory images and conceptions. Word meaning is defined recursively: sentences and other complex expressions mean what they do in virtue of what thought parts their component words express and what thought structure the linguistic structure expresses; and unstructured words mean what they do in living languages in virtue of evolving conventions to use them to express ideas. The difficulties of descriptivism show that the ideas expressed by names are atomic or basic. The reference of a name is the extension of the idea it expresses, which is determined not by causal relations, but by its identity or content together with the nature of objects in the world. Hence a name's reference is dependent on, but not identical to, its meaning. A name is directly and rigidly referential because the extension of the idea it expresses is not determined by the extensions of component ideas. The expression theory thus has the strength of Fregeanism without its descriptivist bias, and of Millianism without its referentialist or causalist shortcomings. The referential properties of ideas can be set out recursively by providing a generative theory of ideas, assigning extensions to atomic ideas, and formulating rules whereby the semantic value of a complex idea is determined by the semantic values of its components. Davis also shows how referential properties can be treated using situation semantics and possible worlds semantics. The key is to drop the assumption that the values of intension functions are the referents of the words whose meaning they represent, and to abandon the necessity of identity for logical modalities. Many other pillars of contemporary philosophical semantics, such as the twin earth arguments, are shown to be unfounded.

As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that shape our future circumstances and affect the sort of person we will be. When choosing whether to start a family, or deciding on a career, we often think we can assess the options by imagining what different experiences would be like for us. L. A. Paul argues that, for choices involving dramatically new experiences, we are confronted by the brute fact that we can know very little about our subjective futures. This has serious implications for our decisions. If we make life choices in the way we naturally and intuitively want to-by considering what we care about, and what our future selves will be like if we choose to have the experience-we only learn what we really need to know after we have already committed ourselves. If we try to escape the dilemma by avoiding an experience, we have still made a choice. Choosing rationally, then, may require us to regard big life decisions as choices to make discoveries, small and large, about the intrinsic nature of experience, and to recognize that part of the value of living authentically is to experience one's life and preferences in whatever way they may evolve in the wake of the choices you make. Using classic philosophical examples about the nature of consciousness, and drawing on recent work in normative decision theory, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, Paul develops a rigorous account of transformative experience that sheds light on how we should understand real-world experience and our capacity to rationally map our subjective futures.

According to the cognitive penetrability hypothesis, our beliefs, desires, and possibly our emotions literally affect how we see the world. This book elucidates the nature of the cognitive penetrability and impenetrability hypotheses, assesses their plausibility, and explores their philosophical consequences. It connects the topic's multiple strands (the psychological findings, computationalist background, epistemological consequences of cognitive architecture, and recent philosophical developments) at a time when the outcome of many philosophical debates depends on knowing whether and how cognitive states can influence perception. All sixteen chapters were written especially for the book. The first chapters provide methodological and conceptual clarification of the topic and give an account of the relations between penetrability, encapsulation, modularity, and cross-modal interactions in perception. Assessments of psychological and neuroscientific evidence for cognitive penetration are given by several chapters. Most of the contributions analyse the impact of cognitive penetrability and impenetrability on specific philosophical topics: high-level perceptual contents, the epistemological consequences of penetration, nonconceptual content, the phenomenology of late perception, metacognitive feelings, and action. The book includes a comprehensive introduction which explains the history of the debate, its key technical concepts (informational encapsulation, early and late vision, the perception-cognition distinction, hard-wired perceptual processing, perceptual learning, theory-ladenness), and the debate's relevance to current topics in the philosophy of mind and perception, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology.

This book explores the long-term outcomes of severe and ongoing trauma-particularly complex posttraumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD)-from phenomenological and cognitive perspectives. For example, C-PTSD can result in impairments at the body-schema level. In order to survive, trauma victims may conduct their lives at the body-image level, thus producing a mismatch between body schema and body image. In turn, as in the case of somatoparaphrenia and body integrity identity disorder, this incongruity can result in body disownership, which will affect long-term outcomes of severe and ongoing trauma.

This is an important thorough book. Guy Boy has presented a masterful review and synthesis of the many factors that affect how people and technology interact in the performance of a task, an understanding that is essential for those who design technology. I strongly recommend it for both students and professionals. -Donald A. Norman, Hewlett-Packard; author of The Invisible Computer "If it is, as I have claimed that AI systems of the future will be less about artificial' intelligence and more about augmented' intelligence, Dr. Boy has produced a veritable handbook on the design of these cognitive prostheses. So sit down, relax, put on your ocular prosthesis and enjoy the read." -Ken Ford, Associate Director, NASA Ames Research Center "This book is a significant first step towards making human-centered design a reality. It provides orientation and guidance for everyone who is concerned with developing systems that integrate people and computers in a context that provides functionality, reliability, flexibility, and responsibility." -Terry Winograd, Professor, Stanford University