This volume features essays that explore the insights of the 14th-century Parisian nominalist philosopher, John Buridan. It serves as a companion to the Latin text edition and annotated English translation of his question-commentary on Aristotle's On the Soul. The contributors survey Buridan's work both in its own historical-theoretical context and in relation to contemporary issues. The essays come in three main sections, which correspond to the three books of Buridan's Questions. Coverage first deals with the classification of the science of the soul within the system of Aristotelian sciences, and surveys the main issues within it. The next section examines the metaphysics of the soul. It considers Buridan's peculiar version of Aristotelian hylomorphism in dealing with the problem of what kind of entity the soul (in particular, the human soul) is, and what powers and actions it has, on the basis of which we can approach the question of its essence. The volume concludes with a look at Buridan's doctrine of the nature and functions of the human intellect. Coverage in this section includes the problem of self-knowledge in Buridan's theory, Buridan's answer to the traditional medieval problem concerning the primary object of the intellect, and his unique treatment of logical problems in psychological contexts.

Each chapter in this book is written by, and devoted to the original work of a leading researcher in his or her own field. The book presents an integrative approach to the psychological study of time in an attempt to bring to light similarities between bodies of research which have been developed independently within different theoretical frameworks - from Piaget's structuralist-organismic model, to information processing approaches. The chapters are organized in a life-span perspective, with different chapters focusing on different age-levels. It includes analyses of time perception in infancy, temporal systems in the developing language, time conception, time measurement and time reading in middle childhood and adolescence, as well as various models of time perception in the adult, both normal and abnormal. A rich concept such as time sheds light on a wide variety of major topics in psychology; the book will be of value to cognitive, developmental and educational psychologists, as well as to psycholinguists.

This study examines the suffering narratives of the Bimo and Christian religious communities of the Yi minority who reside in the remote mountains of Sichuan and Yunnan, China, respectively. It is informed by the theoretical framework of ecological rationality, which posits that religions influence and are influenced by cognitive styles that have co-evolved with the ecological niche of a culture. It was predicted and found that in times of adversity, traditional religious communities differ in emotion expression, causal attribution, and help-seeking behavior, with far-reaching ramifications for how they are uniquely vulnerable to the ravages of modernization. The authors hope that the voices of the study participants, heard through their harrowing narratives, may inspire a deepened sensitivity to the plight of rural Chinese communities as China races to become a superpower in the global economy.

How is performer-object interaction enacted and perceived in the theatre? How thereby are varieties of 'meaning' also enacted and perceived? Using cognitive theory and ecological ontology, Paavolainen investigates how the interplay of actors and objects affords a degree of enjoyment and understanding, whether or not the viewer speaks the language.

The last 15 years has seen an explosion of studies that use cognitive science to understand theatre, whilst at the same time theatre-makers are using their artistic practice to address research question. This book looks at the current discourse around these emerging fields.

This book originated at a workshop by the same name held in May 2018 at the University of Pavia. The aim was to encourage a cross-disciplinary discussion on the limits of cognition. When venturing into cognitive science, notwithstanding the approach, one of the first riddles to be solved is the definition of cognition. Any definition immediately sparks the ascription debate: who/what cognizes? Definitions may appear either too loose, or too demanding. Are bacteria included? What about plants? Is it a human prerogative? We engage in the quest for artificial intelligence, but is artificial cognition already the case? And if it was a human prerogative, are we doing it all the time? Is cognition a process, or the sum of countless sub processes? Is it in the brain, or also in the body? Or does it go beyond the body? Where does it start? Where does it end? We tried answering these questions each from our own perspectives, as philosophers, ethnographers, psychologists and rhetoricians, handing each other our peculiar insight.

This book is one of very few which, address in detail and in-depth, how preservice teachers build important mathematical ideas. A detailed case study of important mathematical learning by five preservice elementary school teachers, who construct powerful mathematical ideas by working through a major influential construction personally.

This book discusses evolution of the human brain, the origin of speech and language. It covers past and present perspectives on the contentious issue of the acquisition of the language capacity. Divided into two parts, this insightful work covers several characteristics of the human brain including the language-specific network, the size of the human brain, its lateralization of functions and interhemispheric integration, in particular the phonological loop. Aboitiz argues that it is the phonological loop that allowed us to increase our vocal memory capacity and to generate a shared semantic space that gave rise to modern language. The second part examines the neuroanatomy of the monkey brain, vocal learning birds like parrots, emergent evidence of vocal learning capacities in mammals, mirror neurons, and the ecological and social context in which speech evolved in our early ancestors. This book's interdisciplinary topic will appeal to scholars of psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, biology and history.

This comprehensive volume provides teachers, researchers and education professionals with cutting edge knowledge developed in the last decades by the educational, behavioural and neurosciences, integrating cognitive, developmental and socioeconomic approaches to deal with the problems children face in learning mathematics. The neurocognitive mechanisms and the cognitive processes underlying acquisition of arithmetic abilities and their significance for education have been the subject of intense research in the last few decades, but the most part of this research has been conducted in non-applied settings and there's still a deep discrepancy between the level of scientific knowledge and its implementation into actual educational settings. Now it's time to bring the results from the laboratory to the classroom. Apart from bringing the theoretical discussions to educational settings, the volume presents a wide range of methods for early detection of children with risks in mathematics learning and strategies to develop effective interventions based on innovative cognitive test instruments. It also provides insights to translate research knowledge into public policies in order to address socioeconomic issues. And it does so from an international perspective, dedicating a whole section to the cultural diversity of mathematics learning difficulties in different parts of the world. All of this makes the International Handbook of Mathematical Learning Difficulties an essential tool for those involved in the daily struggle to prepare the future generations to succeed in the global knowledge society.

This volume contains a contemporary, integrated description of the processes of language. These range from fast scales (fractions of a second) to slow ones (over a million years). The contributors, all experts in their fields, address language in the brain, production of sentences and dialogues, language learning, transmission and evolutionary processes that happen over centuries or millenia, the relation between language and genes, the origins of language, self-organization, and language competition and death. The book as a whole will help to show how processes at different scales affect each other, thus presenting language as a dynamic, complex and profoundly human phenomenon.

One of the most pressing questions in neuroscience, psychology and economics today is how does the brain generate preferences and make choices? With a unique interdisciplinary approach, this volume is among the first to explore the cognitive and neural mechanisms mediating the generation of the preferences that guide choice. From preferences determining mundane purchases, to social preferences influencing mating choice, through to moral decisions, the authors adopt diverse approaches to answer the question. Chapters explore the instability of preferences and thecommon neural processes that occur across preferences. Edited by one of the world s most renowned cognitive neuroscientists, each chapter is authored by an expert in the field, with a host of international contributors.
Emphasis on common process underlying preference generation makes material applicable to a variety of disciplines - neuroscience, psychology, economics, law, philosophy, etc.Offers specific focus on how preferences are generated to guide decision making, carefully examining one aspect of the broad field of neuroeconomics and complementing existing volumesFeatures outstanding, international scholarship, with chapters written by an expert in the topic area"

Could a single human being ever have multiple conscious minds? Some human beings do. The corpus callosum is a large pathway connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. In the second half of the twentieth century a number of people had this pathway cut through as a treatment for epilepsy. They became colloquially known as split-brain subjects. After the two hemispheres of the brain are cortically separated in this way, they begin to operate unusually independently of each other in the realm of thought, action, and conscious experience, almost as if each hemisphere now had a mind of its own. Philosophical discussion of the split-brain cases has overwhelmingly focused on questions of psychological identity in split-brain subjects, questions like: how many subjects of experience is a split-brain subject? How many intentional agents? How many persons? On the one hand, under experimental conditions, split-brain subjects often act in ways difficult to understand except in terms of each of them having two distinct streams or centers of consciousness. Split-brain subjects thus evoke the duality intuition: that a single split-brain human being is somehow composed of two thinking, experiencing, and acting things. On the other hand, a split-brain subject nonetheless seems like one of us, at the end of the day, rather than like two people sharing one body. In other words, split-brain subjects also evoke the unity intuition: that a split-brain subject is one person. Elizabeth Schechter argues that there are in fact two minds, subjects of experience, and intentional agents inside each split-brain human being: right and left. On the other hand, each split-brain subject is nonetheless one of us. The key to reconciling these two claims is to understand the ways in which each of us is transformed by self-consciousness.

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.

"Beginning with the view that human consciousness is essentially embodied and that the way we consciously experience the world is structured by our bodily dynamics and surroundings, the book argues that emotions are a fundamental manifestation of our embodiment, and play a crucial role in self-consciousness, moral evaluation, and social cognition"--

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

This book 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.

The book "Paradigm Shift for Future Tennis" starts with revelations that make obvious the limitations of today's tennis, which does not use the laws of modern Biomechanics and Neurophysiology. The second part of the book includes a new approach to the quantum mind of a champion. It will reveal the secret weapon of Roger Federer and the blueprint of a future tennis champion. This book will expose the new tennis shot emerging from the field of sports science. It is a real weapon, which can generate a ball-speed similar to that of the first serve: the Power High-Forehand. Its aim is to generate maximal possible racket-head speed while players do not wait for the ball to bounce. This is both a tactical and psychological basis for the future tennis game. This aggressive interceptive psychology will shape the minds of future tennis champions. High racket-head speed can be achieved using the stretch-reflex, without big loops and swings. Weapons of a future tennis game will comprise of whip-like tennis serves and ground strokes, based on the stretch-reflex, and using the whole body in a fluid and integrated manner, thus manifesting a superb combination of speed and strength. Restructure your brain and apply the power of state of the art biomechanical, mathematical, medical, neural, cognitive, and quantum computational intelligence to understand the tennis of today and the future

This book brings together a number of essays that are optimistic about the ways certain neuroscientific insights might advance philosophical ethics, and other essays that are more circumspect about the relevance of neuroscience to philosophical ethics. As a whole, the essays form a self-reflective body of work that simultaneously seeks to derive normative ethical implications from neuroscience, and to question whether and how that may be possible at all. In doing so, the collection brings together psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, ethics, and philosophy of science. Neuroscience seeks to understand the biological systems that guide human behavior and cognition. Normative ethics, on the other hand, seeks to understand the system of abstract moral principles dictating how people ought to behave. By studying how the human brain makes moral judgments, can philosophers learn anything about the nature of morality itself? A growing number of researchers believe that neuroscience can, indeed, provide insights into the questions of philosophical ethics. However, even these advocates acknowledge that the path from neuroscientific is to normative ethical ought can be quite fraught.

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.

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.