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

This book provides a multifaceted analysis of how the human face drives many of our most important social behaviors. People perceive the identities, genders, and attractiveness of others from the many different faces they see every day. There has been great deal of research on the psychology, neuropsychology and neuroscience of how these perceptions are formed. However the facial displays of leadership, with their almost ubiquitous role in our social lives, remain largely unexplored. Carl Senior argues that perhaps now more than ever, it is crucial to understand how facial displays communicate leadership abilities. This book brings together perspectives from a range of international experts across a variety of fields including social psychology, organisational sciences and the study of primates, with the aim to further our understanding of this fundamental social force. Scholars and professionals, as well as anyone interested in learning more about how the face is used to drive our perception of leadership, will find this book of great interest.

Understanding Intellectual Disability: A Guide for Professionals and Parents supports professionals and parents in understanding critical concepts, correct assessment procedures, delicate and science-infused communication practices and treatment methods concerning children with intellectual disabilities. From a professional perspective, this book relies on developmental neuropsychology and psychiatry to describe relevant measures and qualitative observations when making a diagnosis and explores the importance of involving parents in the reconstruction of a child's developmental history. From a parent's perspective, the book shows how enriched environments can empower children's learning processes, and how working with patients, families, and organizations providing care and treatment services can be effectively integrated with attachment theory. Throughout seven chapters, the book offers an exploration of diagnostic procedures, new insights on the concept of intelligence and the role of communication and secure attachment in the mind's construction. With expertise from noteworthy scholars in the field, the reader is given an overview of in-depth assessment and intervention practices illustrated by several case studies and examples, as well as a lifespan perspective from a Human Rights Model of disability. Understanding Intellectual Disability is an accessible guide offering an up-to-date vision of intellectual disability and is essential for psychologists, health care professionals, special educators, students in clinical psychology, and parents. Things are connected through invisible bonds: you cannot pluck a flower without unsettling a star. Galileo Galilei

This book presents the essential background for understanding semantic theories of mood. Mood as a category is widely used in the description of languages and the formal analysis of their grammatical properties. It typically refers to the features of a sentence-individual morphemes or grammatical patterns-that reflect how the sentence contributes to the modal meaning of a larger phrase, or that indicate the type of fundamental pragmatic function that it has in conversation. In this volume, Paul Portner discusses the most significant semantic theories relating to the two main subtypes of mood: verbal mood, including the categories of indicative and subjunctive subordinate clauses, and sentence mood, encompassing declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives. He evaluates those theories, compares them, and draws connections between seemingly disparate approaches, and he formalizes some of the literature's most important ideas in new ways in order to draw out their most significant insights. Ultimately, this work shows that there are crucial connections between verbal mood and sentence mood which point the way towards a more general understanding of how mood works and its relation to other topics in linguistics; it also outlines the type of semantic and pragmatic theory which will make it possible to explain these relations. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of semantics and pragmatics, philosophy, computer science, and psychology.

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.

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...

Rapid advances in cognitive neuroscience and converging technologies have led to a vigorous debate over cognitive enhancement. This book outlines the ethical and social issues, but goes on to focus on the policy dimensions, which until now have received much less attention. As the economic, social and personal stakes involved with cognitive enhancement are so high, and the advances in knowledge so swift, we are likely to see increasing demands for government involvement in cognitive enhancement techniques. The book therefore places these techniques in a political context and brings the subsequent considerations and divisions to the forefront of the debate, situating their resolution within the milieu of interest group politics. The book will provide a starting point from which readers can develop a balanced policy framework for addressing such concerns.

Books on intellectual development typically separate development into distinct developmental periods: the formation of intelligence and basic cognitive skills that occurs until adolescence, and the maintenance, decline, or improvement of these intellectual skills across the adult life span. Robert Sternberg and Cynthia Berg have integrated research on these two development periods, by bringing together authors that provide a comprehensive overview to the major approaches to intellectual development. Six approaches to intellectual development are examined by authors who use the perspective during childhood or during adulthood: psychometric, Piagetian, new-Piagetian, information-processing, learning, and contextual perspectives. Common themes arise within, and across, particular perspectives, which suggests that a more unified view of intellectual development may emerge as boundary lines betwen perspectives and developmental periods diminish.

The Psychology of Learning and Motivation publishes empirical and theoretical contributions in cognitive and experimental psychology, ranging from classical and instrumental conditioning to complex learning and problem solving. Each chapter provides a thoughtful integration of a body of work.

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.

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.

This proceedings volume presents the latest scientific research and trends in experimental economics, with particular focus on neuroeconomics. Derived from the 2016 Computational Methods in Experimental Economics (CMEE) conference held in Szczecin, Poland, this book features research and analysis of novel computational methods in neuroeconomics. Neuroeconomics is an interdisciplinary field that combines neuroscience, psychology and economics to build a comprehensive theory of decision making. At its core, neuroeconomics analyzes the decision-making process not only in terms of external conditions or psychological aspects, but also from the neuronal point of view by examining the cerebral conditions of decision making. The application of IT enhances the possibilities of conducting such analyses. Such studies are now performed by software that provides interaction among all the participants and possibilities to register their reactions more accurately. This book examines some of these applications and methods. Featuring contributions on both theory and application, this book is of interest to researchers, students, academics and professionals interested in experimental economics, neuroeconomics and behavioral economics.

This edited book adopts a cognitive perspective to provide breadth and depth to state-of-the-art research related to understanding, analyzing, predicting and improving one of the most prominent and important classes of behavior of modern humans, information search. It is timely as the broader research area of cognitive computing and cognitive technology have recently attracted much attention, and there has been a surge in interest to develop systems and technology that are more compatible with human cognitive abilities. Divided into three interlocking sections, the first introduces the foundational concepts of information search from a cognitive computing perspective to highlight the research questions and approaches that are shared among the contributing authors. Relevant concepts from psychology, information and computing sciences are addressed. The second section discusses methods and tools that are used to understand and predict information search behavior and how the cognitive perspective can provide unique insights into the complexities of the behavior in various contexts. The final part highlights a number of areas of applications of which education and training, collaboration and conversational search interfaces are important ones. Understanding and Improving Information Search - A Cognitive Approach includes contributions from cognitive psychologists, information and computing scientists around the globe, including researchers from Europe (France, Netherlands, Germany), the US, and Asia (India, Japan), providing their unique but coherent perspectives to the core issues and questions most relevant to our current understanding of information search behavior and improving information search.

Human beings have been using intoxicating substances for millennia. But while most people have used psychoactive substances without becoming dependent on them, a significant minority develop substance use disorders. The question remains: why does addiction occur in some and not others? The 61st installment of the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Genes and the Motivation to Use Substances probes the complex role of genetics in substance use and abuse across diverse methodologies, research organisms, levels of analysis and disciplines. Its combined lifespan/motivation approach to individual differences sheds necessary light on genetic vs. environmental factors in vulnerability, addiction risk, the relationship between behavioral disinhibition and substance use and the motivation to quit. While alcohol use/abuse is the focus of much of the book, its chapters provide scientific and clinical insights into substance abuse in general as well as implications for treatment. And an intriguing conclusion discusses the need to bridge the gap between genetics and neuroscience and the best scientific conditions in which this integration may thrive. Included in the coverage: * Rodent models of genetic contributions to the motivation to use alcohol. * The adolescent origins of substance abuse disorders * The developmental matrix of addictive behavior * The genetics of cannabis involvement * The DNA methylation signature of smoking * Genomics of impulsivity: integrating genetics and neuroscience. Reflecting the current state of knowledge in a field with groundbreaking potential, Genes and the Motivation to Use Substances is a fascinating resource for psychologists, psychiatrists, geneticists, neuroscientists, social workers, policymakers and researchers in addiction.

Young's thesis concludes that the higher activities of humans can be illuminated through an examination of the actual brain functions that produce them, and that these processes can be closely compared to those of a calculating machine.

This diverse set of essays traces Epstein's experimental and theoretical work over a 15 year period. Four of the essays were coauthored by the eminent psychologist B.F. Skinner. The book demonstrates how the scientific study of behavior can increase our understanding and effectiveness in many domains: creativity and innovation, parenting, artificial intelligence, self-improvement, and even world peace. Reviewers have praised the volume as an impressive effort by one of America's most notable psychologists.

Epstein's goals in writing this book were (a) to present some relatively interesting papers that can stand alone and (b) to organize and edit them so that sections have some integrity and so that the overall volume paints a fairly consistent picture of his evolving views on cognition, creativity, and behavior. Parts I and II focus on generativity research and theory and on some Columban (pigeon) simulations of human behavior, and Part III includes some related laboratory studies. Part IV is concerned with efforts to create a comprehensive science of behavior, and Part V includes essays about Skinner, one of the principle architects of behaviorism. Part VI includes forays into artifical intelligence, child rearing, categorization research, and other topics, and Part VII takes the volume to some uncertain reflections on growing older, and to a modest proposal for a day of world peace.

This book contains original articles submitted to the Seventh International Conference on Cognitive Neurodynamics (ICCN 2019). The brain is an endless case study of a complex system characterized by multiple levels of integration, multiple time scales of activity, and multiple coding and decoding properties. The contribution of several disciplines, mathematics, physics, computer science, neurobiology, pharmacology, physiology, and behavioral and clinical sciences, is necessary in order to cope with such seemingly unattainable complexity that transforms the experimental information into a tricky puzzle which hides the correspondence with model predictions. This conference gathered active participants to discuss ideas and pose new questions from different viewpoints, ranging from single neurons and neural networks to animal/human behavior in theoretical and experimental studies. The conference is organized with plenary lectures, mini-symposia, interdisciplinary round tables, and oral and poster sessions.

How do animals learn? By what means can animals be conditioned? This volume of the acclaimed Handbook of Perception and Cognition, Second Edition, reviews such basic models as Pavlovian conditioning as well as more modern models of animal memory and social cognition. Sure to represent a benchmark of a vast literature from diverse disciplines, this reference work is a useful addition to any library devoted to animal learning, conditioning behavior, and interaction.

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.

This book defends a novel view of mental representation-of how, as thinkers, we represent the world as being. The book serves as a response to two problems in the philosophy of mind. One is the problem of first-personal, or egocentric, belief: how can we have truly first personal beliefs-beliefs in which we think about ourselves as ourselves-given that beliefs are supposed to be attitudes towards propositions and that propositions are supposed to have their truth values independent of a perspective? The other problem is how we can think about nonexistents (e.g., Santa Claus) given the widespread view that thought essentially involves a relation between a thinker and whatever is being thought about. The standard responses to this puzzle are either to deny that thought is essentially relational or to insist that it is possible to stand in relations to nonexistents. This book offers an error theory to the problem. The responses from this book arise from the same commitment: a commitment to treating talk of propositions-as the things towards which our beliefs are attitudes-as talk of entities that actually exist and that play a constitutive and explanatory role in the activity of thought.