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.

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.

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.
Leading authors review the state-of-the-art in their field of investigation and provide their views and perspectives for future researchChapters are extensively referenced to provide readers with a comprehensive list of resources on the topics coveredAll chapters include comprehensive background information and are written in a clear form that is also accessible to the non-specialist

Foundations of Art Therapy: Theory and Applications is an essential and comprehensive introduction to the field of art therapy that blends relevant psychological and neuroscience research, theories, and concepts and infuses cultural diversity throughout each chapter. The text includes full color photos, informative charts, and case examples and is divided into four parts beginning with the basics of art therapy knowledge and concluding with professional practices in art therapy. The fundamentals of art therapy section includes coverage of art therapy founders, art materials, multicultural perspectives, intersections with neuroscience, and research methods. An overview and in-depth explorations of different theoretical approaches to the practice of art therapy are covered in the second part of the book. A bio-psycho-social approach integrates current research on art therapy with specific populations (children, mental health, older adults, and trauma). The book concludes with art therapy professional practices in group concepts, community-based art therapy, and developing a career in the field. Each chapter contains chapter objectives, practical applications, ethical considerations, reflection questions, experiential exercises, and a list of terms. The unique, practical, and interdisciplinary approach of this text provides a solid base for understanding the field of art therapy and is well suited for use in undergraduate art therapy courses. This book will appeal to those who want an introduction to the field's theories, research, and practice and those seeking a comprehensive understanding on the foundations of art therapy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alles kom ter sprake in Ek is by brein: puberteit, seksualiteit, Alzheimer se siekte, misdadigheid, geloof, breinbeserings, psigiese probleme en byna-dood ervarings. Die teks is toeganklik genoeg geskryf dat enigiemand wat belangstel in hoe die brein ons lewe rig en beïnvloed, dit maklik leesbaar sal vind.

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.

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.

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.

This book offers a novel perspective on abduction. It starts by discussing the major theories of abduction, focusing on the hybrid nature of abduction as both inference and intuition. It reports on the Peircean theory of abduction and discusses the more recent Magnani concept of animal abduction, connecting them to the work of medieval philosophers. Building on Magnani's manipulative abduction, the accompanying classification of abduction, and the hybrid concept of abduction as both inference and intuition, the book examines the problem of visual perception together with the related concepts of misrepresentation and semantic information. It presents the author's views on caricature and the caricature model of science, and then extends the scope of discussion by introducing some standard issues in the philosophy of science. By discussing the concept of ad hoc hypothesis generation as enthymeme resolution, it demonstrates how ubiquitous the problem of abduction is in all the different individual scientific disciplines. This comprehensive text provides philosophers, logicians and cognitive scientists with a historical, unified and authoritative perspective on abduction.

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.

This is the third volume in the Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science Series. It is based on a conference that was held in 1990, which was sponsored by the Cognitive Science Program and Linguistics Department of Simon Fraser University. Over the last decade, there has emerged a paradigm of cognitive modeling that has been hailed by many researchers as a radically new and promising approach to cognitive science. This new paradigm has come to be known by a number of names, including "connectionism", "neural networks", and "parallel distributed processing", (or PDP). This method of computation attempts to model the neural processes that are thought to underlie cognitive functions in human beings. Unlike the digital computation methods used by AI researchers, connectionist models claim to approximate the kind of spontaneous, creative and somewhat unpredicatable behavior of human agents. However, over the last few years, a heated controversy has arisen over the extent to which connectionist models are able to provide successful explanations for higher cognitive processes. A central theme of this book reviews the adequacy of recent attempts to implement higher cognitive processes in connectionist networks.

Significant improvements in lifestyle and medical science are leading to an ever increasing elderly population in the United States and other developed nations. The U.S census bureau estimates that the number of people over 65 will nearly double by 2030, and that the elderly will comprise nearly one-fifth of the world's entire population within the next 20 years. In Animal Models of Human Cognitive Aging, Jennifer Bizon, Alisa Woods, and a panel of international authorities comprehensively discuss the use of animal models as a tool for understanding cognitive changes associated with the aging process. The book provides substantive background on the newest and most widely used animal models in studies of cognition and aging, while detailing the normal and pathological processes of brain aging of humans in relation to those models. Additional chapters comprehensively review frontal cortical deficits and executive function in primates as related to humans, and the use of transgenic modulation in mice to model Alzheimer's and other age-related diseases. Groundbreaking and authoritative, Animal Models of Human Cognitive Aging provides a valuable resource for Neuroscientists, Gerontological Scientists and all aging medicine researchers, while serving as a primer for understanding current brain aging studies.

Seeing, Doing, and Knowing is an original and comprehensive philosophical treatment of sense perception as it is currently investigated by cognitive neuroscientists. Its central theme is the task-oriented specialization of sensory systems across the biological domain. Sensory systems are automatic sorting machines; they engage in a process of classification. Human vision sorts and orders external objects in terms of a specialized, proprietary scheme of categories - colours, shapes, speeds and directions of movement, etc. This 'Sensory Classification Thesis' implies that sensation is not a naturally caused image from which an organism must infer the state of the world beyond; it is more like an internal communication, a signal concerning the state of the world issued by a sensory system, in accordance with internal conventions, for the use of an organism's other systems. This is why sensory states are both easily understood and persuasive. Sensory classification schemes are purpose-built to serve the knowledge-gathering and pragmatic needs of particular types of organisms. They are specialized: a bee or a bird does not see exactly what a human does. The Sensory Classification Thesis helps clarify this specialization in perceptual content and supports a new form of realism about the deliverances of sensation. This 'Pluralistic Realism' is based on the idea that sensory systems coevolve with an organism's other systems; they are not simply moulded to the external world. The last part of the book deals with reference in vision. Cognitive scientists now believe that vision guides the limbs by means of a subsystem that links up with the objects of physical manipulation in ways that bypass sensory categories. In a novel extension of this theory, Matthen argues that 'motion-guiding vision' is integrated with sensory classification in conscious vision. This accounts for the quasi-demonstrative form of visual states: 'This particular object is red', and so on. He uses this idea to cast new light on the nature of perceptual objects, pictorial representation, and the visual representation of space.

Psychopaths constitute less than 1% of the general population but over 20% of prison populations. They commit a disproportionate amount of crime and violence in society. Given that the economic burden of crime in the United States is estimated to be over $2.3 trillion per year, psychopaths likely constitute one of the most expensive mental health conditions known today. This volume chronicles the latest science of psychopathy and the various ways the condition intersects with the criminal justice system. From the modern techniques to assess the symptoms, to its utility in predicting violent recidivism, to the latest neuroscience youth and adults, and the most promising avenues for treatment, this volume captures the modern science of the condition and discusses ethical and legal issues surrounding psychopaths.