This book represents a unique collection of diverse scientific perspectives, methods, and theoretical frameworks that collectively explore the wide range of processes involved in intellectual functioning. Chapters contributed by various researchers comprise sections on Information Processing, Neuroscience, Animal Models, Language Processing, and Applied Cognition. Issues involve both the scientific assessment of intellectual functioning, as well as its potential modifiability.

Cognitive Informatics (CI) is the science of cognitive information processing and its applications in cognitive computing. CI is a transdisciplinary enquiry of computer science, information science, cognitive science, and intelligence science that investigates into the internal information processing mechanisms and processes of the brain. Advances and engineering applications of CI have led to the emergence of cognitive computing and the development of Cognitive Computers (CCs) that reason and learn. As initiated by Yingxu Wang and his colleagues, CC has emerged and developed based on the transdisciplinary research in CI, abstract intelligence (aI), and denotational mathematics after the inauguration of the series of IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Informatics since 2002 at Univ. of Calgary, Stanford Univ., and Tsinghua Univ., etc. This volume in LNCS (subseries of Computational Intelligence), LNCI 323, edited by Y. Wang, D. Zhang, and W. Kinsner, presents the latest development in cognitive informatics and cognitive computing. The book focuses on the explanation of cognitive models of the brain, the layered reference model of the brain, the fundamental mechanisms of abstract intelligence, and the implementation of computational intelligence by autonomous inference and learning engines based on CCs.

Our dress is our identity. In dress, we live, move and have our social being. This book shows how the dressed body is central to the construction of a recognizable identity and provides accessible accounts of the particular dress ‘ ways’ associated with a considerable variety of lifestyles. Churchgoers, ballerinas, Muslim schoolgirls, glamour models, ‘ vampires’ , monks and country gents all fashion a social self through dress. These cultures all have characteristic forms of displaying the dressed body for social visibility - whether in religion, sex, performance, or on the street. In contrast to much of the literature on dress, which often assumes a lack of agency on the part of the wearer, contributors to this book focus on the conscious manipulation of dress to reflect an identity that is designed to look ‘ different’ .
Why do people choose to mark themselves off socially from others? What are the costs and benefits? For every dress ‘ identity’ , there is a corresponding set of entitlements and expectations as to behaviour and belief. ‘ Priestly’ bodies inhabit a different universe of response from strippers, just as ‘ Gothic’ bodies experience the public gaze differently from ‘ Methodist’ ones. Where one look commands respect in one setting, in another it can incite antipathy and rejection. Contributors tackle head-on this ‘ paradox of dress’ - its potent power to unite and divide. Evidence of the dressed body’ s social ambiguity as a medium of consensus, on the one hand, and conflict, on the other, provides a glimpse through dress into an elementary condition of social and cultural lifethat has all too rarely been part of historical and sociological discourse.

In the past decade, psychology has increasingly acknowledged the importance of considering the role of culture for understanding human development. One of the major issues now confronting those interested in this issue is how cultural meanings, values, and practices are appropriated by persons growing up and living in concrete contexts. The general theme addressed in this volume concerns how enactments of cultural understandings in social interactions form the fabric of individual experience and the specificities of individual development.

This book offers an inspiring and naive view on language and reasoning. It presents a new approach to ordinary reasoning that follows the author's former work on fuzzy logic. Starting from a pragmatic scientific view on meaning as a quantity, and the common sense reasoning from a primitive notion of inference, which is shared by both laypeople and experts, the book shows how this can evolve, through the addition of more and more suppositions, into various formal and specialized modes of precise, imprecise, and approximate reasoning. The logos are intended here as a synonym for rationality, which is usually shown by the processes of questioning, guessing, telling, and computing. Written in a discursive style and without too many technicalities, the book presents a number of reflections on the study of reasoning, together with a new perspective on fuzzy logic and Zadeh's "computing with words" grounded in both language and reasoning. It also highlights some mathematical developments supporting this view. Lastly, it addresses a series of questions aimed at fostering new discussions and future research into this topic. All in all, this book represents an inspiring read for professors and researchers in computer science, and fuzzy logic in particular, as well as for psychologists, linguists and philosophers.

This volume is a collection of research studies on the modeling of emotions in complex autonomous systems. Several experts in the field are reporting their efforts and reviewing the literature in order to shed lights on how the processes of coding and decoding emotional states took place in humans, which are the physiological, physical, and psychological variables involved, invent new mathematical models and algorithms to describe them, and motivate these investigations in the light of observable societal changes and needs, such as the aging population and the cost of health care services. The consequences are the implementation of emotionally and socially believable machines, acting as helpers into domestic spheres, where emotions drive behaviors and actions. The contents of the book are highly multidisciplinary since the modeling of emotions in robotic socially believable systems requires a holistic perspective on topics coming from different research domains such as computer science, engineering, sociology, psychology, linguistic, and information communication. The book is of interest both to experts and students since last research works on a so complex multidisciplinary topic are described in a neat and didactical scientific language.

Surely you've experienced it before: you're listening to a piece of music and all of a sudden you find a lump in your throat, a tear in your eye, or a chill down your spine.

Whether it's Beethoven's Choral Symphony or The Verve's 'Bittersweet Symphony', a bit of blues or a bit of baroque, music has the power to move us. It's a language which we all speak. But why does it have this effect on us? What is going on, emotionally, physically and cognitively when listeners have strong emotional responses to music? What, if anything, do such responses mean? Can they tell us anything about ourselves?

Jeanette Bicknell uses research in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology to address these questions, ultimately showing us that the reason why some music tends to arouse powerful experiences in listeners is inseparable from the reason why any music matters at all. Musical experience is a social one, and that is fundamental to its attractions and power over us.

Human and organizational factors have a substantial impact on the performance of planning and scheduling processes. Despite widespread and advanced decision support systems, human decision makers are still crucial to improve the operational performance in manufacturing industries. In this text, the state of the art in this area is discussed by experts from a wide variety of engineering and social science disciplines. Moreover, recent results from collaborative studies and a number of field cases are presented. The text is targeted at researchers and graduate students, but is also particularly useful for managers, consultants, and system developers to better understand how human performance can be advanced.

A large number of volumes have been produced summarizing the work on generation and control of rhythmic movements, in particular locomotion. Unfortunately most of them focus on locomotor studies done on animals. This edited volume redresses that imbalance by focusing completely on human locomotor behaviour. The very nature of the problem has both necessitated and attracted researchers from a wide variety of disciplines ranging from psychology, neurophysiology, kinesiology, engineering, medicine to computer science. The different and unique perspectives they bring to this problem provide a comprehensive picture of the current state of knowledge on the generation and regulation of human locomotor behaviour.

A common unifying theme of this volume is studying the adaptability of human gait to obtain insights into the control of locomotion. The intentional focus on "adaptability" is meant to draw attention to the importance of understanding the generation and regulation of "skilled locomotor behaviour" rather than just the generation of basic locomotor patterns which has been the major focus of animal studies. The synthesis chapter at the end of the volume examines how the questions posed, the technology, and the experimental and theoretical paradigms have evolved over the years, and what the future has in store for this important research domain.

This volume contains contributions illuminating much of the current research occurring in the area of visual perception. It encompasses all aspects of vision and its relationship to vehicle design, including both the internal and external design of the vehicle as well as the perceptual and cognitive limitations of the vehicle controller.

Issues specifically related to the vision of the driver are initially addressed and the problems of vehicle glazing and light transmission are considered. The major topics of visual perception and vehicle control are covered in three related chapters encompassing: collision avoidance, vehicle signalling systems and the acquisition of visual information. Moving on to the external environment and its relationship to vision, traffic signs are discussed. Approaches to the measurement and modelling of driver behaviour are dealt with and the area of telerobotic control of vehicles is considered. In-vehicle displays are covered in two related chapters addressing issues of visual workload and effects of display type.

It is hoped that the book, contributed to by experts from a diverse range of disciplines, including optometrists, psychologists, physiologists, human factors specialists and engineers, will stimulate the progression of research in this area, as effectively as the preceding volumes did.

The relationship of language to cognition, especially in development, is an issue that has occupied philosophers, psychologists, and linguists for centuries. In recent years, the scientific study of sign languages and deaf individuals has greatly enhanced our understanding of deafness, language, and cognition. This Counterpoints volume considers the extent to which the use of sign language might affect the course and character of cognitive development, and presents a variety of viewpoints in this debate.
This volume brings the language-thought discussion into a clearer focus, both theoretically and practically, by placing it in the context of children growing up deaf and the influences of having sign language as their primary form of communication. The discussion is also sharpened by having internationally recognized contributors, such as Patricia Siple, Diane Lillo-Martin, and Ruth Campbell, with specialties in varied areas, all converging on a common interest in which each has conducted empirical research. These contributors clarify and challenge the theoretical assumptions that have driven arguments in the language-thought debate for centuries. An introduction by the editors provides a historical overview of the issues as well as a review of empirical findings that have been offered in response to questions about language-thought relations in deaf children. The final chapters are structured in the form of "live" debate, in which each contributor is given the opportunity to respond to the other perspectives presented in this volume.

This text, based on a course taught by Randall O'Reilly and Yuko Munakata over the past several years, provides an in-depth introduction to the main ideas in the computational cognitive neuroscience. The goal of computational cognitive neuroscience is to understand how the brain embodies the mind by using biologically based computational models comprising networks of neuronlike units. This text, based on a course taught by Randall O'Reilly and Yuko Munakata over the past several years, provides an in-depth introduction to the main ideas in the field. The neural units in the simulations use equations based directly on the ion channels that govern the behavior of real neurons, and the neural networks incorporate anatomical and physiological properties of the neocortex. Thus the text provides the student with knowledge of the basic biology of the brain as well as the computational skills needed to simulate large-scale cognitive phenomena. The text consists of two parts. The first part covers basic neural computation mechanisms: individual neurons, neural networks, and learning mechanisms. The second part covers large-scale brain area organization and cognitive phenomena: perception and attention, memory, language, and higher-level cognition. The second part is relatively self-contained and can be used separately for mechanistically oriented cognitive neuroscience courses. Integrated throughout the text are more than forty different simulation models, many of them full-scale research-grade models, with friendly interfaces and accompanying exercises. The simulation software (PDP++, available for all major platforms) and simulations can be downloaded free of charge from the Web. Exercise solutions are available, and the text includes full information on the software.

In 1975, the Environmental Fund sponsored a full-page advertisement in leading newspapers, which predicted that 'the world as we know it will likely be ruined before the year 2000', due to the assumed inability of world food production to keep pace with the increase in population. The statement was endorsed by some of the finest thinkers of the time - scientists, scholars, and other professionals who had spent their careers applying the principles of critical thinking to their chosen disciplines. Nonetheless, in this instance, they all failed to use the same rigor in assessing the probability of looming disaster and badly miscalculated. This is just one example of how even the best thinkers can sometimes go astray, and it illustrates how easily unconscious biases can undermine the critical thinking process.In this insightful analysis of the mental pitfalls that trip up even elite critical thinkers, psychologist Todd C Riniolo makes a compelling case that under certain circumstances everyone is vulnerable to accepting erroneous beliefs. Riniolo begins by reviewing the hallmarks of critical thinking related to the evaluation of claims, such as the use of the double-blind procedure and the law of parsimony. He then provides an evolutionary framework and empirical supporting evidence from cognitive psychology to explain why being inconsistent in the use of critical thinking is part of our evolutionary heritage. Each of us possesses cognitive biases that make us prone to maintaining our current beliefs (both true and false).He concludes by focusing on a wide range of claims - environmental, political, economic, multicultural - to illustrate how in certain contexts we all are tempted to abandon critical thinking. Thoroughly researched yet written in a lively, witty style, this unique approach to critical thinking will interest students, teachers, and anyone who wishes to become a better thinker.

"Engaging Audiences" provides an insightful introduction to spectatorship from the perspective of cognitive studies. Using performances of several plays and a wide array of scientific evidence, McConachie examines the dynamics of conscious attention, mental concepts, empathy, emotion, and culture in theatregoing. This ground-breaking study challenges many of the current theories used to understand spectators and is a valuable resource to artists and scholars interested in how and why audiences enjoy performance.

What drives us to make decisions? Future-Minded explores the psychological processes of agency and control. If you've ever wondered why we think of coincidences as matters of fate rather than the result of the laws of probability, this book provides the answer. From memory and reasoning to our experiences of causality and consciousness, it unpicks the mechanisms we use on a daily basis to help us predict, plan for and attempt to control the future. Future-Minded * Features a wealth of real world examples to help you engage with this fast-developing area * Provides clear analysis of psychological experiments and their findings to explain the evidence behind the theory Thought-provoking and highly topical, Future-Minded is fascinating reading for psychology students studying cognition or consciousness, and for anyone interested in understanding how we try to determine the future.

Political Communication and Cognition draws on a range of theories from communication psychology to explain how citizens receive communication about politics, how communication might make a citizen think and importantly what stimulates political participation, whether simply paying attention, chatting online or going to vote.

An integrative introduction to the theories and themes in research on creativity, this book is both a reference work and text for courses in this burgeoning area of research. The book begins with a discussion of the theories of creativity (Person, Product, Process, Place), the general question of whether creativity is influenced by nature or nurture, what research has indicated of the personality and style of creative individuals from a personality analysis standpoint, how social context affects creativity, and then coverage of issues like gender differences, whether creativity can be enhanced, if creativity is related to poor mental or physical health, etc.
The book contains boxes covering special interest items including one page biographies of famous creative individuals and activities for a group or individual to test and/or encourage creativity, as well as references to internet sites relating to creativity.
*Breaks down the major theories about creativity but doesn't restrict to a singular perspective
*Includes extensive citations of existing literature
*Textbook features included (i.e., key terms defined)

How does motivation work? The classic answer is that people are motivated to approach pleasure and avoid pain, that they are motivated by "carrots and sticks." But to understand human motivation, it is necessary to go beyond pleasure and pain. What people want is to be effective in their life pursuits, and there are three distinct ways that people want to be effective. They want to be effective in having desired results (value), which includes having pleasure but is not limited to pleasure. They want to be effective in managing what happens (control) and in establishing what's real (truth), even if the process of managing what happens or establishing what's real is painful. These three distinct ways of wanting to be effective go beyond just wanting pleasure, but there is even more to the story of how motivation works. These ways of wanting to be effective do not function in isolation. Rather, they work together. Indeed, the ways that value, truth, and control work together is the central story of motivation. By understanding how motivation works as an organization of value, truth, and control motives, we can re-think basic motivational issues, such as the nature of personality and culture, how the motives of others can be managed effectively, and what is "the good life."

Going beyond the hype of recent fMRI "findings," this interdisciplinary collection examines such questions as: Do women and men have significantly different brains? Do women empathize, while men systematize? Is there a "feminine" ethics? What does brain research on intersex conditions tell us about sex and gender?

Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book explores the emerging topics and rapid technological developments of robotics and artificial intelligence through the lens of the evolving role of sex robots, and how they should best be designed to serve human needs. An international panel of authors provides the most up-to-date, evidence-based empirical research on the potential sexual applications of artificial intelligence. Early chapters discuss the objections to sexual activity with robots while also providing a counterargument to each objection. Subsequent chapters present the implications of robot sex as well as the security and data privacy issues associated with sexual interactions with artificial intelligence. The book concludes with a chapter highlighting the importance of a scientific, multidisciplinary approach to the study of human - robot sexuality. Topics featured in this book include: The Sexual Interaction Illusion Model. The personal companion system, Harmony, designed by Realbotix (TM). An exposition of the challenges of personal data control and protection when dealing with artificial intelligence. The current and future technological possibilities of projecting three-dimensional holograms. Expert discussion notes from an international workshop on the topic. AI Love You will be of interest to academic researchers in psychology, robotics, ethics, medical science, sociology, gender studies as well as clinicians, policy makers, and the business sector.

What underlies the worlds most acclaimed acts of creative genius? Can we predict who has the capacity to become a noble creator? These are just a sample of questions addressed by the studies in this book, tackled by the author in unique fashion. He first compiles large databases on samples of eminent creators and their products. The databases, which may include both biographical and historical information, as well as characteristics on the creations, are then subjected to advanced statistical analyses. In this way, the investigator can tease out the factors that led to the achievements of an Archimedes, Descartes, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, or Beethoven. We can also discover the reasons for the phenomenal success of certain masterpieces. By using these historiometric methods, psychologists can enhance our scientific comprehension of the most important phenomena of human behavior - creativity and genius.

Provides new empirical study data that explores the influence of linguistic variables within developmental contexts on theory of mind development and functioning

Establishes context for usage, including personal, social, and business interactions

Offers a comprehensive overview on the most current studies that address the relationship between language and theory of mind

This volume provides a sample of the research on individual differences in different content areas of study. The first section presents authors whose concern is with development at some stage. The second section presents chapters on exceptionality (a chapter on learning disability and another on gif

In this book, a generic model in as far as possible mathematical closed-formis developed that predicts the behavior of large self-organizing robot groups (robot swarms) based on their control algorithm. In addition, an extensive subsumption of the relatively young and distinctive interdisciplinary research field of swarm robotics is emphasized. The connection to many related fields is highlighted and the concepts and methods borrowed from these fields are described shortly.