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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Cognition & cognitive psychology > General
This volume creates a bridge across cognitive development and cognitive aging. Pairs of researchers study the rise and fall of specific cognitive functions, such as attention, executive functioning, memory, working memory, representations, language, problem solving, intelligence, and individual differences to find ways in which the study of development and decline converge on common processes and mechanisms. The contributed chapters are framed by an introduction that sets out the problems to be discussed and a conclusion that extracts the common themes and speculates on the implications for theory building. The book is unique in offering a lifespan approach to cognition by experts in the individual facts of cognitive functioning from either the developmental or the aging perspective.
Our understanding of the nature and processing of figurative language is central to several important issues in cognitive science, including the relationship of language and thought, how we process language, and how we comprehend abstract meaning. Over the past fifteen years, traditional approaches to these issues have been challenged by experimental psychologists, linguists, and other cognitive scientists interested in the structures of the mind and the processes that operate on them. In Figurative Language and Thought, internationally recognized experts in the field of figurative language, Albert Katz, Mark Turner, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., and Cristina Cacciari, provide a coherent and focused debate on the subject. The book's authors discuss a variety of fundamental questions, including: What can figures of speech tell us about the structure of the conceptual system? If and how should we distinguish the literal from the nonliteral in our theories of language and thought? Are we primarily figurative thinkers and consequently figurative language users or the other way around? Why do we prefer to speak metaphorically in everyday conversation, when literal options may be available for use? Is metaphor the only vehicle through which we can understand abstract concepts? What role do cultural and social factors play in our comprehension of figurative language? These and related questions are raised and argued in an integrative look at the role of nonliteral language in cognition. This volume, a part of Counterpoints series, will be thought-provoking reading for a wide range of cognitive psychologists, linguists, and philosophers.
A more nuanced perspective on cognition, behavior, personality, and pathology. Mind/brain. It is explained that mental activity is not possible without concepts/memory structures that exist in the brain and result from perceptual learning. Core mental activities including thinking, reasoning, and judgment are described as components of self-regulation and in terms of interacting neural systems. This framework also leads to a more specific and less stigmatizing system for classifying and diagnosing mental illnesses. This concise volume: Introduces the S-O-R (stimulus-organism-response) model of mental activity. Recasts mental processes as neuro-mental processes. Provides empirical evidence for the neural basis for judgments. Addresses ongoing mind/brain questions such as whether thinking is unconscious. Key Insights into Basic of Mental Activity will interest scientists doing research in psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, human biology/anthropology, linguistics, and neuroscience. Professors, lecturers, and instructors will find it important as a class text in these fields. And the book's clinical implications make it useful to practitioners of psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy.
This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.
There is a critical, bidirectional relationship between sleep and cognition, yet the literature in this area is scattered, and it is surprisingly difficult to find a comprehensive overview of the basic principles, latest discoveries, and outstanding challenges. This issue of "Progress in Brain Research" is split over 2
volumes, bringing together cutting-edge research on the topic in
the basic, clinical and applied sciences. The 2 volumes review
current knowledge and understanding, provide a starting point for
researchers and practitioners entering the field, and build a
platform for further research and discovery.
How does the genome, interacting with the multi-faceted environment, translate into the development by which the human brain achieves its astonishing, adaptive array of cognitive and behavioral capacities? Why and how does this process sometimes lead to neurodevelopmental disorders with a major, lifelong personal and social impact? This volume of "Progress in Brain Research" links findings on
the structural development of the human brain, the expression of
genes in behavioral and cognitive phenotypes, environmental effects
on brain development, and developmental processes in perception,
action, attention, cognitive control, social cognition, and
language, in an attempt to answer these questions.
This book employs a new eco-cognitive model of abduction to underline the distributed and embodied nature of scientific cognition. Its main focus is on the knowledge-enhancing virtues of abduction and on the productive role of scientific models. What are the distinctive features that define the kind of knowledge produced by science? To provide an answer to this question, the book first addresses the ideas of Aristotle, who stressed the essential inferential and distributed role of external cognitive tools and epistemic mediators in abductive cognition. This is analyzed in depth from both a naturalized logic and an ecology of cognition perspective. It is shown how the maximization of cognition, and of abducibility - two typical goals of science - are related to a number of fundamental aspects: the optimization of the eco-cognitive situatedness; the maximization of changeability for both the input and the output of the inferences involved; a high degree of information-sensitiveness; and the need to record the "past life" of abductive inferential practices. Lastly, the book explains how some impoverished epistemological niches - the result of a growing epistemic irresponsibility associated with the commodification and commercialization of science - are now seriously jeopardizing the flourishing development of human creative abduction.
Human cognition increasingly is coming to be understood and studied as something that does not necessarily reside within individuals, but rather as something that evolves through interpersonal communication. Using the interpersonal event as the unit of analysis, the authors of "Collaborative Cognition" examine how children interactively co-construct knowledge and ways of knowing in social contexts. In an illustration of the idea that thinking is as much interactive as self-reflective--one that supports the cognitive developmental theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky--this important new study examines the social origins of thought, and the inherently discursive nature of thinking itself. The social context in question was created by the authors, who showed to pairs of children a variety of game materials and asked them to collaborate on creating a board game. Negotiating the co-construction of a game, back and forth, turn by turn, enabled the children to construct jointly a series of mutually obligatory goals and rules that sequentially defined the evolution of increasingly more complex modes of play. This innovative use of sequential analyses to study evolving streams of conversation discourse represents a fully process-oriented, rather than outcome-oriented, approach to studying cognitive development.
Component cognitive processes have played a critical role in the development of experimental aging research and theory in psychology as attested by articles published on this theme. However, in the last five to ten years, there has been a substantial increase in the number of articles attempting to isolate a single factor (or small subset of factors) responsible for age differences in information processing. This view of aging is frequently termed the complexity model of the generalized slowing model, the primary assumption being that age differences in cognition are due simply to a relatively larger performance decrement on the part of older adults (compared to younger adults) as task complexity increases. Because generalized complexity theorists have questioned the utility of using component cognitive processes as theoretical constructs, the editors feel it is time to restate why component cognitive processes are critical to any thorough understanding of age differences in cognition. Thus the present edited volume represents an attempt to demonstrate the utility of the process-specific approach to cognitive aging. Central to this effort are illustrations of how regression analyses may provide evidence for general slowing by maximizing explained variance while at the same time obscuring local sources of variance. The book concentrates on age differences in word and language processing, because these factors relate to reading which is a critical cognitive process used in everyday life. Furthermore, age differences in word and language processing illustrate the importance of taking component cognitive processes into consideration. The breadth of coverage of the book attests to the wide range of cognitive processes involved in word and language processing.
Thiscollection of 58 articles from therecently-published third
edition of the INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EDUCATION focus on
learning, memory, attention, problem solving, concept formation,
and language. Learning and cognition is the foundation of cognitive
psychology and encompasses many topics including attention, memory,
categorization, etc. Most books in the area either focus on one
subtopic in-depth (e.g. an entire book on memory) or cover the
gamut of subjects in a series of long, technical handbook-like
chapters. This concise reference offers researchers and professors
teaching in the area a new take on the material that is
comprehensive in breadth, but lighter in depth - focusing on main
findings, established facts, and minimizing the amount of space
taken up by large, multi-volume references.
From the Preface: Blending ideas from operations research, music psychology, music theory, and cognitive science, this book aims to tell a coherent story of how tonality pervades our experience, and hence our models, of music. The story is told through the developmental stages of the Spiral Array model for tonality, a geometric model designed to incorporate and represent principles of tonal cognition, thereby lending itself to practical applications of tonal recognition, segmentation, and visualization. Mathematically speaking, the coils that make up the Spiral Array model are in effect helices, a spiral referring to a curve emanating from a central point. The use of "spiral" here is inspired by spiral staircases, intertwined spiral staircases: nested double helices within an outer spiral. The book serves as a compilation of knowledge about the Spiral Array model and its applications, and is written for a broad audience, ranging from the layperson interested in music, mathematics, and computing to the music scientist-engineer interested in computational approaches to music representation and analysis, from the music-mathematical and computational sciences student interested in learning about tonality from a formal modeling standpoint to the computer musician interested in applying these technologies in interactive composition and performance. Some chapters assume no musical or technical knowledge, and some are more musically or computationally involved.
This book explores an eminently human phenomenon: our capacity to engage with the possible, to go beyond what is present, visible, or given in our existence. Possibility studies is an emerging field of research including topics as diverse as creativity, imagination, innovation, anticipation, counterfactual thinking, wondering, the future, social change, hope, agency, and utopia. The Possible: A Sociocultural Theory contributes to this wide field by developing a sociocultural account of the possible grounded in the notions of difference, position, perspective, dialogue, action, and culture. This theory aims to offer conceptual, methodological, and practical tools for all those interested in studying human possibility and cultivating it in education, at the workplace, in everyday life, and in society.
The Map of Consciousness Explained is an essential primer on the late Dr David R. Hawkins's teachings on human consciousness and their associated energy fields. Using muscle testing, Dr Hawkins conducted more than 250,000 calibrations during 20 years of research to define a range of values, attitudes and emotions that correspond to levels of consciousness. This range of values - along with a logarithmic scale of 1 to 1,000 - became the Map of Consciousness, which Dr Hawkins first wrote about in his New York Times bestseller, Power vs. Force. In this book, readers will gain an introduction and deeper understanding of the Map, with visual charts and practical applications to help them heal, recover and evolve to higher levels of consciousness and energy.
From Subject to Subjectivities profiles the recent debates about the role of qualitative and participatory methods in psychology, a discipline which has traditionally seen itself as a form of positivistic science. Contributors explain how fundamentally different views of the nature of reality and of scientific theory have shaped these debates, and how psychology is being transformed through the use of these methods. At the heart of the book are 10 exemplars of interpretive and participatory action research which describe the rationale for and process of using these methods in actual cases. They also articulate some of the challenges psychologists may face in adopting them, offering insights into how these complications can be successfully negotiated. Relevant beyond psychology, the models provided can be used within the context of a wide array of social science disciplines, from sociology and anthropology to women's studies and public health. The contributors represent a veritable "who's who" of qualitative scholars, including Lyn Mikel Brown, Larry Davidson, Michelle Fine, Louise Kidder, M. Brinton Lykes, Jeanne Marecek, Abigail Stewart, and Niobe Way. No previous book has examined qualitative and participatory methods specifically within the context of psychology. From Subjects to Subjectivities provides a unique and badly needed resource for those interested in learning about the practice of these methods in the field.
Philosophers have usually argued that the right way to explain people's actions is in terms of their beliefs and intentions rather than in terms of objective facts. Rowland Stout takes the opposite line in his account of action. Appeal to teleology is widely regarded with suspicion, but Dr Stout argues that there are things in nature, namely actions, which can be teleologically explained: they happen because they serve some end. Moreover, this teleological explanation is externalist: it cites facts about the world, not beliefs and intentions which only represent the world. Such externalism about the explanation of action is a natural partner to externalism about knowledge and about reference, but has hardly ever been considered seriously before. One dramatic consequence of such a position is that it opens up the possibility of a behaviourist account of beliefs and intentions.
This book examines how and why collaborative quality assurance techniques, particularly pair programming and peer code review, affect group cognition and software quality in agile software development teams. Prior research on these extremely popular but also costly techniques has focused on isolated pairs of developers and ignored the fact that they are typically applied in larger, enduring teams. This book is one of the first studies to investigate how these techniques depend on and influence the joint cognitive accomplishments of entire development teams rather than individuals. It employs theories on transactive memory systems and functional affordances to provide answers based on empirical research. The mixed-methods research presented includes several in-depth case studies and survey results from more than 500 software developers, team leaders, and product managers in 81 software development teams. The book's findings will advance IS research and have explicit implications for developers of code review tools, information systems development teams, and software development managers.
Steve Croker's The Development of Cognition is an exciting new text which offers a refreshing and contemporary account of the major theories and practical applications of children's cognitive development from infancy onwards. Written in a clear and accessible style this comprehensive text enables students to carefully examine and critically assess the processes through which development occurs, together with the nature of the changes in language, perception, memory, conceptual understanding and problem-solving that take place. The Development of Cognition is ideally suited for cognitive development modules typically taught in the second and third years of undergraduate psychology courses throughout the world.
During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic increase in interest in the study of ageing-related changes in cognitive abilities. In this volume researchers from a variety of theoretical perspectives discuss adult age differences in a wide range of cognitive skills. Of special interest is the extent to which ageing effects on performance are related to variations in the representation, organization and utilization of knowledge, broadly defined. Recent research and theory in the field of ageing has emphasized the need to examine such processes more closely in order to provide a more complete understanding of ageing effects on cognitive behaviour.
How did social communication evolve in primates? In this volume, primatologists, linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers of science systematically analyze how their specific disciplines demarcate the research questions and methodologies involved in the study of the evolutionary origins of social communication in primates in general and in humans in particular. In the first part of the book, historians and philosophers of science address how the epistemological frameworks associated with primate communication and language evolution studies have changed over time and how these conceptual changes affect our current studies on the subject matter. In the second part, scholars provide cutting-edge insights into the various means through which primates communicate socially in both natural and experimental settings. They examine the behavioral building blocks by which primates communicate and they analyze what the cognitive requirements are for displaying communicative acts. Chapters highlight cross-fostering and language experiments with primates, primate mother-infant communication, the display of emotions and expressions, manual gestures and vocal signals, joint attention, intentionality and theory of mind. The primary focus of the third part is on how these various types of communicative behavior possibly evolved and how they can be understood as evolutionary precursors to human language. Leading scholars analyze how both manual and vocal gestures gave way to mimetic and imitational protolanguage and how the latter possibly transitioned into human language. In the final part, we turn to the hominin lineage, and anthropologists, archeologists and linguists investigate what the necessary neurocognitive, anatomical and behavioral features are in order for human language to evolve and how language differs from other forms of primate communication.
What mediates between sensory input and motor output? This is probably the most basic question one can ask about the mind. There is stimulation on your retina, something happens in your skull and then you hand reaches out to grab the apple in front of you. What is it that happens in between? What representations make it possible for you to grab this apple? Bence Nanay calls these representations that make it possible for you to grab the apple 'pragmatic representations'. In Between Perception and Action he argues that pragmatic representations whose function is to mediate between sensory input and motor output play an immensely important role in our mental life. And they help us to explain why the vast majority of what goes on in our mind is very similar to the simple mental processes of animals. The human mind, like the mind of non-human animals, has been selected for allowing us to perform actions successfully. And the vast majority of our actions, like the actions of non-human animals, could not be performed without perceptual guidance. And what provides the perceptual guidance for performing actions are pragmatic representations. If we accept this framework, many classic questions in philosophy of perception and of action will look very different. The aim of this book is to trace the various consequences of this way of thinking about the mind in a number of branches of philosophy as well as in psychology and cognitive science.
For courses in Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Learning and Memory, Philosophy of Mind, and Philosophy of Psychology. The first book that fully integrates information about the brain and neural processing into the standard curriculum in cognitive psychology. Based on a need for a text that could accurately, productively, and seamlessly integrate information on both the brain and neural processing, Edward E. Smith (Columbia University) and Stephen M. Kosslyn (Harvard University) created Cognitive Psychology: Mind and Brain 1.e. Without question, the study of cognition has progressed enormously over the past decade. Most importantly, much of the recent progress in cognitive studies has come from the advent of cognitive neuroscience, which uses neuroscientific methods and data to address psychological issues. However, throughout years of academic teaching, the authors came to realize that no currently available book was able to summarize and make accessible the major findings, theories, and research the field had produced. Now, in this text's first edition, these issues have been addressed. Using findings in neuroscience to illuminate and motivate key distinctions in cognitive psychology, the authors have written a cognitive psychology book that is informed by neuroscience - the first of its kind and one poised to set a new standard in undergraduate cognitive studies.
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