The central thesis of Schizotypy: Implications for Illness and Health is both challenging and controversial: that the features of psychotic disorders actually lie on a continuum with, and form part of, normal behaviour and experience. The dispositional or 'schizotypal' traits associated with psychotic disorders certainly predispose an individual to mental illness, but they may also lead to positive outcomes such as enhanced creativity or spiritual experience. Discussion of each aspect of this theme is supported by extensive experimental and clinical evidence, questioning the received medical wisdom which treats psychotic illness in the narrow context of neurological disease. The result is an authoritative and provocative overview of an important topic in psychological research and clinical practice.

Over the past three decades, there has been a rapid development of research on human thinking and reasoning. This volume provides a comprehensive review of this topic by looking at the important contributions Paolo Legrenzi has made to the field, by bridging the gap from Gestalt ideas to modern cognitive psychology. The contributors, including some of the most distinguished scholars of reasoning and thinking in Europe and the USA, reflect upon the ways in which he has influenced and inspired their own research, and contributed to modern approaches to human inference. This volume draws on both traditional and new topics in reasoning and thinking to provide a wide-ranging survey of human thought. It covers creativity, problem-solving, the linguistic and social aspects of reasoning and judgement, and the social and emotional aspects of decision making through telling examples, such as the cognitive mechanisms underlying consumers' attitudes towards herbal medicines. It considers a series of key questions, such as how do individuals who are unfamiliar with logic reason? And how do they make choices if they are unfamiliar with the probability calculus and decision theory? The discussions are placed throughout within a wider research context and the contributors consider the implications of their research for the field as a whole, making the volume an essential reference for anyone investigating the processes that underlies our thinking, reasoning, and decision-making in everyday life.

This book focuses on the evolutionary and developmental origins of the social mind. Written by leading scientists in the field, the book brings together the currently segregated views on social cognition in the two fields.

This book addresses one of the most famous and controversial arguments in the study of language and mind, the Poverty of the Stimulus. Presented by Chomsky in 1968, the argument holds that children do not receive enough evidence to infer the existence of core aspects of language, such as the dependence of linguistic rules on hierarchical phrase structure. The argument strikes against empiricist accounts of language acquisition and supports the conclusion that knowledge of some aspects of grammar must be innate. In the first part of Rich Grammars from Poor Inputs, contributors consider the general issues around the POS argument, review the empirical data, and offer new and plausible explanations. This is followed by a discussion of the the processes of language acquisition, and observed 'gaps' between adult and child grammar, concentrating on the late spontaneous acquisition by children of some key syntactic principles, basically, though not exclusively, between the ages of 5 to 9. Part 3 widens the horizon beyond language acquisition in the narrow sense, examining the natural development of reading and writing and of the child's growing sensitivity for the fine arts.

The main function of language is to convey meaning. Therefore, argues Bernd Heine in these pages, the question of why language is structured the way it is must first of all be answered with reference to this function. Linguistic explanations offered in terms of other exponents of language structure (for example, syntax) are likely to highlight peripheral or epi-phenomenal-rather than central-characteristics of language structure. Heine provides a solid introductory treatment of the ways in which language structure (that is, grammar) and language usage can be explained with reference to the processes underlying human conceptualization and communication. Exploring and area of linguistics that has developed only recently and is rapidly expanding, Cognitive Foundations of Grammar will appeal to students of linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, especially those interested in grammaticalization processess.

A collection of state-of-the-art presentations on visualization problems in mathematics, fundamental mathematical research in computer graphics, and software frameworks for the application of visualization to real-world problems. Contributions have been written by leading experts and peer-refereed by an international editorial team. The book grew out of the third international workshop ‘Visualization and Mathematics’, May 22-25, 2002 in Berlin. The variety of topics covered makes the book ideal for researcher, lecturers, and practitioners.

The book contains contributions by leading figures in philosophy of mind and action, emotion theory, and phenomenology. As the focus of the volume is truly innovative we expect the book to sell well to both philosophers and scholars from neighboring fields such as social and cognitive science. The predominant view in analytic philosophy is that an ability for self-evaluation is constitutive for agency and intentionality. Until now, the debate is limited in two (possibly mutually related) ways: Firstly, self-evaluation is usually discussed in individual terms, and, as such, not sufficiently related to its social dimensions; secondly, self-evaluation is viewed as a matter of belief and desire, neglecting its affective and emotional aspects. The aim of the book is to fill these research lacunas and to investigate the question of how these two shortcomings of the received views are related.

This book is a collection of writings by active researchers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence, on topics of central importance in the field. Each chapter focuses on one theoretical problem, proposes a novel solution, and is written in sufficiently non-technical language to be understandable by advanced undergraduates or scientists in allied fields. This book is the very first collection in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) focusing on theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical issues in the creation of thinking machines. All the authors are researchers actively developing AGI projects, thus distinguishing the book from much of the theoretical cognitive science and AI literature, which is generally quite divorced from practical AGI system building issues. And the discussions are presented in a way that makes the problems and proposed solutions understandable to a wide readership of non-specialists, providing a distinction from the journal and conference-proceedings literature. The book will benefit AGI researchers and students by giving them a solid orientation in the conceptual foundations of the field (which is not currently available anywhere); and it would benefit researchers in allied fields by giving them a high-level view of the current state of thinking in the AGI field. Furthermore, by addressing key topics in the field in a coherent way, the collection as a whole may play an important role in guiding future research in both theoretical and practical AGI, and in linking AGI research with work in allied disciplines

Are women really better than men at reading other people's minds? Are longer-married couples better than newlyweds at anticipating their partners' thoughts and feelings? Do we all possess a dormant "sixth sense" that, if fully utilized, could allow us to intuit with great accuracy what other people are thinking? Internationally recognized psychologist William Ickes answers these and many other questions in this fascinating examination of the mind's potential for "everyday mind reading." After developing an innovative video-based procedure for measuring the accuracy of people's empathic inferences, Ickes and his colleagues used this procedure to study different aspects of everyday mind reading in research conducted over the past 15 years. Among the issues they have explored are the validity of the belief in women's intuition, how long it takes strangers to "get to know" each other, why friendships promote mutual understanding, why twins tend to have similar thoughts and feelings, how people's frames of reference can both help and hinder their communication, and the neurological basis for our ability to empathize with others. Ickes also extends his inquiry to broader social questions. For example, are there ways of detecting when someone has a hidden agenda? Are there circumstances in which accurately "reading" an intimate partner's thoughts and feelings actually harms, rather than helps, the relationship? How can the results of the research on everyday mind reading be applied to improve parenting skills, the effectiveness of counseling, even sales and marketing? Finally, what does the scientific evidence say about the widely debated notion of ESP?

More than 40 years ago, E. Paul Torrance undertook to study creativity in students and study whether it would predict their creative achievements as adults. He and his colleagues wanted to determine what other factors influence, predict, encourage or sustain their creativity over time. There has never been a longitudinal study of creativity of this magnitude. Its findings will be useful to, and have implications for, several audiences: parents, teachers, counselors--especially vocational counselors--university and college instructors, and educational administrators. The Manifesto for Children was developed on the basis of the responses of 215 young adults who had attended two elementary schools in Minnesota from 1958 to 1964. They had been administered some creativity tests each year, and they were followed up in 1980. On the basis of their questionnaire responses, the Manifesto was developed to describe their ongoing struggle to maintain their creativity and use their strengths to create their careers and to provide guidance to children. In 1998, they were followed up to assess their creative achievements and to validate the Manifesto. Some of the participants had attained eminence, while others had attained only mediocre careers.

This book consolidates and extends the authors' work on the connection between iconicity and abductive inference. It emphasizes a pragmatic, experimental and fallibilist view of knowledge without sacrificing formal rigor. Within this context, the book focuses particularly on scientific knowledge and its prevalent use of mathematics. To find an answer to the question "What kind of experimental activity is the scientific employment of mathematics?" the book addresses the problems involved in formalizing abductive cognition. For this, it implements the concept and method of iconicity, modeling this theoretical framework mathematically through category theory and topoi. Peirce's concept of iconic signs is treated in depth, and it is shown how Peirce's diagrammatic logical notation of Existential Graphs makes use of iconicity and how important features of this iconicity are representable within category theory. Alain Badiou's set-theoretical model of truth procedures and his relational sheaf-based theory of phenomenology are then integrated within the Peircean logical context. Finally, the book opens the path towards a more naturalist interpretation of the abductive models developed in Peirce and Badiou through an analysis of several recent attempts to reformulate quantum mechanics with categorical methods. Overall, the book offers a comprehensive and rigorous overview of past approaches to iconic semiotics and abduction, and it encompasses new extensions of these methods towards an innovative naturalist interpretation of abductive reasoning.

'In a time when too many minds seem closed, this is a masterful analysis of what it takes to open them' Adam Grant, author of the bestselling Think Again 'Optimistic, illuminating and even inspiring' Guardian As the world is increasingly polarised, it feels impossible to change the mind of someone with a conflicting view. But this book shows that you could be one conversation away from changing someone's mind about something, maybe a lot of things. Self-delusion expert and psychology nerd David McRaney sets out to discover not just what it takes to influence others, but why we believe in the first place. Along the way he meets a former Westboro Baptist Church member who was deradicalised on Twitter, goes deep canvassing to see how quickly people will surrender their character-defining views, finds a 9/11 Truther who turns his back on it all, and reveals how, within a few years, half a country can go from opposing the 'gay agenda' to happily attending same-sex weddings. Distilling the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, How Minds Change reveals how beliefs take hold, not over hundreds of years, but in less than a generation, in less than a decade, and sometimes in an instant.

Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account is the first book-length treatment of philosophical issues and implications in current cellular and molecular neuroscience. John Bickle articulates a philosophical justification for investigating "lower level" neuroscientific research and describes a set of experimental details that have recently yielded the reduction of memory consolidation to the molecular mechanisms of long-term potentiation (LTP). These empirical details suggest answers to recent philosophical disputes over the nature and possibility of psycho-neural scientific reduction, including the multiple realization challenge, mental causation, and relations across explanatory levels. Bickle concludes by examining recent work in cellular neuroscience pertaining to features of conscious experience, including the cellular basis of working memory, the effects of explicit selective attention on single-cell activity in visual cortex, and sensory experiences induced by cortical microstimulation. This final chapter poses a challenge both to "mysterians," who insist that empirical science cannot address particular features of consciousness, and to cognitivists, who insist that addressing consciousness scientifically will require experimental and theoretical resources that go beyond those used in neuroscience's cellular and molecular core.
Bickle develops all scientific and philosophical concepts in detail, making this book accessible to specialists, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in either philosophy or the empirical brain and cognitive sciences. Philosophers of science, mind, neuroscience, and psychology, neuroscientists working at a variety of levels, and cognitive scientists-or anyone interested in interactions between contemporary philosophy and science and the nature of reduction-in-practice that informs current mainstream neuroscience-will find discussions pertinent to their concerns.

Arguably the most influential thinker on education in the twentieth century, Dewey's contribution lies along several fronts. His attention to experience and reflection, democracy and community, and to environments for learning have been seminal...

This book aims to highlight the vigour, diversity and insight of the various cognitive science perspectives on personality and emotion. It aims also to emphasise the rigorous scientific basis for research to be found in the integration of experimental psychology with neuroscience, connectionism and the new evolutionary psychology. The contributors to this book provide a wide-ranging survey of leading-edge research topics. It is divided into three parts, on general frameworks for cognitive science, on perspectives from emotion research, and on perspectives from studies of personality traits.

That time is both a dimension of behaviour and a ubiquitous controlling variable in the lives of all living things has been well recognized for many years.
The last decade has seen a burgeoning of interest in the quantitative analysis of timing behaviour, and progress during the last five or six years has been particularly impressive, with the publication of several major new theoretical contributions.
There has also been considerable progress in behavioural methodology during the past decade. In the area of reinforcement schedules, for example, the venerable interresponse time schedule, fixed interval peak procedure and interval bisection task have been complemented by a 'second generation' of incisive instruments for analyzing timing behaviour.
Another area of recent development is the analysis of the neurobiological substrate of timing behaviour. Several research groups are currently studying the involvement of various central neurotransmitter systems in the timing behaviour, and the ability of centrally acting drugs and discrete brain lesions to alter timing processes.
Yet another recent development in timing research is the growing dialogue between two fields that have grown up separately, although, superficially at least, they seem to have much in common: the experimental analysis of 'interval timing', traditionally the province of experimental psychology, and behavioural chronobiology. The last few years have seen a growing interest in the comparative properties of the internal 'clocks' that regulate biobehavioural rhythms with time bases in the circadian range or longer, and those that are entailed in timing of intervals in the range of seconds or minutes.
All these areas of research, and others, are represented in the chapters that make up this volume. This book will help to promote further interactions among researchers who hail from disparate disciplines, but who share a common interest in the temporal properties of behaviour."

Thinking is an innate ability that most people take for granted. But like writing well or speaking effectively before the public, thinking well is a skill that can be learned and improved with practice. In this unique introduction to critical thinking, Robert Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford first lay out the principles of critical thinking and then invite readers to put these principles to the test by examining a series of unusual and challenging case studies. Assembling a wide range of bizarre but actual incidents from many cultures and various time periods, they demonstrate how the tools of critical thinking can help to unravel alleged paranormal events and seemingly mysterious behavior. What factors led to the "Martian panic" of 1938? Why did many people conclude that an alien spaceship crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947? How do we explain the panic expressed by otherwise normal Southeast Asian men who came to believe that a contagious disease was causing their genitals to shrink, or the frenzied dance manias that captivated thousands of Europeans during the Middle Ages? Bartholomew and Radford show that reality is very much a social construction, that cultural assumptions play a large part in our judgments about what is normal and what is deviant, and that the use of critical reasoning is our best means of ensuring an objective perspective.