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Books > Academic & Education > Professional & Technical > Psychology
This volume contains selected papers from the 10th Interdisciplinary Workshop in Informatics and Psychology which had as its theme Cognitive Aspects in Visual Languages and Interfaces. Visual languages in general, visual programming languages in particular, and graphical or visual user interfaces are increasingly regarded as important improvements for the interaction between people and artifacts. Visual and graphical user interfaces have already a history of a number of years in terms of research and development. The focus on visual languages and visual programming languages, however, is more recent. The development of graphical user interfaces was accompanied and reinforced by psychological research but visual languages are still mainly inventions of designers and not designed on the basis of principles derived also from knowledge of psychology or other behavioral sciences. The presentations and discussions at the workshop showed increasing interest in paradigms of visual languages and their psychological foundation. Visual languages and interfaces must be seen as means to support and enhance represention, application and processing knowledge visually. The study of the cognitive aspects in visual languages and interfaces is thus an important part of Human-Computer Interaction as a discipline "concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computer systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them" (definition of HCI in the ACM SIGCHI Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction). This book will stimulate future research in the area of Human-Computer Interaction and Visual Languages.
The simple task of grasping objects has been studied for centuries by scientists, therapists and engineers who have tried to understand and duplicate the versatility of the human hand. Using an interdisciplinary approach and new framework for looking at prehension, the authors uncover the subleties of the amazing interaction between the hand and the brain. They draw from such diverse fields as experimental psychology, kinesiology, robotics, neural networks, artificial intelligence, neuropsychology and rehabilitation. A triangle strategy is presented, starting from conceptual models that suggest both experimental and computational models. Chapters describe the multiple postures established by the hand, phases in the dynamic process of reaching for, grasping and manipulating various objects, and the constraints acting on such activity. Appendices provide the complete anatomy of the upper limb, the basics of computational modelling, and the fundamentals of prosthetic and dextrous robot hands. The ultimate goal of this book is to develop a common vocabularly for multidisciplinary researchers who strive to understand a system as complex as the hand under the control of the human brain.
Clinical Neuropsychology is an up-to-the minute overview of the
major and many interesting minor disorders and behavioral syndromes
caused by localized brain damage or abnormal brain functioning. The
text combines clinical findings with studies on normal, healthy
individuals to provide a comprehensive picture of the human brain's
operation and function. Biological rather than cognitive in
emphasis, Clinical Neuropsychology integrates findings across a
broad range of disciplines. This text serves as an up-to-date
reference source for clinicians, researchers, and graduate students
and as a textbook for advanced undergraduate courses on clinical
neuropsychology. Coverage includes the ramifications of localized
brain damage/abnormal brain functioning on emotion, thought,
language, and behavior, illustrative case histories, chapter
overviews, and more than 700 recent references.
The area of intelligent and adaptive user interfaces has been of interest to the research community for a long time. Much effort has been spent in trying to find a stable theoretical base for adaptivity in human-computer interaction and to build prototypical systems showing features of adaptivity in real-life interfaces. To date research in this field has not led to a coherent view of problems, let alone solutions. A workshop was organized, which brought together a number of well-known researchers in the area of adaptive user interfaces with a view to
The pre-eminent 19th century British ethicist, Henry Sidgwick once
said:
Recent government publications like "Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy" and "Science for all Americans" have given teachers a mandate for improving science education in America. What we know about how learners construct meaning--particularly in the natural sciences--has undergone a virtual revolution in the past 25 years. Teachers, as well as researchers, are now grappling with how to better teach science, as well as how to assess whether students are learning. Assessing Science Understanding is a companion volume to Teaching Science for Understanding, and explores how to assess whether learning has taken place. The book discusses a range of promising new and practical tools for assessment including concept maps, vee diagrams, clinical interviews, problem sets, performance-based assessments, computer-based methods, visual and observational testing, portfolios, explanatory models, and national examinations.
This volume is sponsored by Division 9 of the American
Psychological Association: The Society for the Psychological Study
of Social Issues.****This is an essential reference book for any
social scientist or student who uses measuresof attitude or
personality in his or her research. The earlier version, published
twenty years ago, was to be found on the shelf of virtually
everyone who worked in the field.
Given medical advances and greater understanding of healthful
living habits, people are living longer lives. Proportionally
speaking, a greater percentage of the population is elderly.
Despite medical advances, there is still no cure for dementia, and
as elderly individuals succumb to Alzheimer's Disease or related
dementia, more and more people are having to care their elderly
parents and /or siblings. Profiles in Caregiving is practical
source of information for anyone who teaches caregiving, acts as a
caregiver, or studies caregiving.
While the main source of knowledge of human cognition has come from studies of information processing in a single culture, primarily within the U.S. or within certain countries in Europe, much research has also been conducted in other parts of the world. Can the study of cognition across cultures lead us to interesting conclusions about human cognition in general? Surely any general theory of language processing, for example, must be able to explain phenomena observed across cultures and not just within a single one. This book is an attempt to look at this issue of universals in thinking and understanding by providing a compendium of cross cultural investigations in the four major areas of cognitive psychology: (1) memory and knowledge representation, (2) language processing, (3) perception, and (4) reasoning and problem solving. The differences found across cultures are also fascinating and extremely informative. A final chapter provides a summary of the major findings reported in each of these areas. The chapters included in this work were written for those interested in cross-cultural psychology and also those with an interest in cultural anthropology. The authors are well-known in the areas of cross-cultural psychology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and anthropology. However, the reader need not be an expert in any one of these fields to understand the conclusions and implications of the work reported here.
The first title to be published in the "BRAT Series on Clinical Psychology", this book presents a critical analysis of the theories and empirical evidence to date regarding the origins of phobias and anxiety disorders, and the reasons why more women than men suffer from them. The book moves from a discussion of non-specific temperament to specific risk factors for each anxiety disorder, assuming a hierarchical aetiological model throughout. At each level of analysis, the issue of gender differences is addressed. For example, broad temperamental factors such as traits of negative affectivity and poor emotional regulation are reviewed in terms of their relevance to the group of disorders with which anxiety disorders tend to cluster, such as depression and substance abuse. Biological contributions are covered, along with early life experiences including parenting styles and expectations, and early stressors. The components of anxiety - hypervigilance, threat-laden belief systems and avoidant style - are presented as being common across the anxiety disorders and self-perpetuating. Types of ongoing life experiences that influence the development of one type of anxiety disorder over another are reviewed. Each anxiety disorder is then addressed in detail after considering general principles of fear acquisition and persistence.
This handbook shows the wide perspective cognitive-behavioural treatment can offer to health professionals, the vast majority of whom now recognize that cognitive behavioural procedures are very useful in treating many 'mental' disorders, even if certain disciplines continue to favour other kinds of treatment. This book offers a wide range of structured programmes for the treatment of various psychological/psychiatric disorders as classified by the DSM-IV. The layout will be familiar to the majority of health professionals in the description of mental disorders and their later treatment. It is divided into seven sections, covering anxiety disorders, sexual disorders, dissociative, somatoform, impulse control disorders, emotional disorders and psychotic and organic disorders. Throughout the twenty-three chapters, this book offers the health professional a structured guide with which to start tackling a whole series of 'mental' disorders and offers pointers as to where to find more detailed information. The programmes outlined should, it is hoped, prove more effective than previous approaches with lower economic costs and time investment for the patient and therapist.
Left-handedness has been shown to be a possible marker for various psychological and physical abnormalities. This book presents evidence by a number of researchers who evaluate whether there are indeed differences between left- and right-handers which extend into the broader psychological and physiological realms. Several chapters show that left-handedness is found in unexpectedly high proportions in populations that suffer from various immune deficiency diseases, in alcoholics, dyslexics, mental retardates, psychopaths and other clinical groups. The book indicates why left-handedness should be a marker for such conditions. The genetic and environmental pressures on handedness are explored. A model for pathological left-handedness is presented, along with some interesting data which suggests that left-handedness may be associated with reduced life-span. Finally, several chapters discuss the implications of handedness patterns in non-clinical populations.
Treating Adult Children of Alcoholics showcases the first
collection of treatment chapters devoted entirely to a systematic
behavioral analysis of drinking and nondrinking offspring of
alcoholic families. The author identifies the functional and
behavioral characteristics that make up the adult children of
alcoholics (ACOA) syndrome. This compendium combines current
innovations in behavioral medicine with multi-componential
interventions shown effective with the variety of disorders evident
in this patient population. This handbook for practitioners is
richly laced with case examples and addresses the needs of
therapists seeking fast, effective and proven treatments for
longstanding clinical symptoms of children of alcoholics.
The relation between mind and brain can never be understood by science until the nature of consciousness and self-consciousness is clearly perceived as specific system-properties. In this volume the author tackles this problem in a rigorous analysis which begins with the general dynamics of living systems and leads the reader step-by-step towards firm conclusions about the physical processes of consciousness and the main categories of mental events. Finally the author moves from the cognitive to the affective, and proceeds to interpret a number of uniquely human sensibilities in the light of the general biological perspective he has established.
This volume presents a variety of studies relating to the reach to grasp movement and provides a necessary and valuable contribution to the field of motor control. The professions covered in this book range from those interested in the basic sciences to those more interested in practical application. Neurophysiologists and biomechanists join with therapists and neural modelers to present an extensive overview of current developments. Evolutionary and developmental aspects are included together with descriptions of how this movement is affected by central nervous system damage. Purely theoretical aspects of the motor control of this movement are interspersed with treatment applications and robotics.
Two fields of interest are combined in this volume: the history of
science and the theory, or philosophy, of science (metascience).
The result is a history of psychology with emphasis placed upon a
metascientific analysis of the work of fourteen psychologists from
various periods.
This volume attempts to bring together a collection of current approaches to, and related empirical investigations on, the development of coordination in the first two years of life. It will be of interest to scientists and students in, for example, biology, human movement sciences, kinesiology, psychology, pediatrics, physiology, physical education, physical therapy and robotics. Contributors include those with established reputations in the field, as well as young authors, who are beginning to make their mark. Their efforts resulted in twenty chapters, of which seventeen were invited. The chapters have been divided into four sections. The first chapter is intended to outline the structure of the book.
The book is concerned with the cognitive contributions to
perception, that is, with the influence of attention, intention, or
motor processes on performances in spatial and temporal tasks. The
chapters deal with fundamental perceptual processes resulting from
the simple localization of an object in space or from the temporal
determination of an event within a series of events. The themes of the book are highly topical. There is a growing
interest in studies both with healthy persons and with patients
that focus on localization errors and dissociations in
localizations resulting from different tasks. These errors lead to
new concepts of how visual space is represented. Such deviations
are not only observed in the spatial domain but in the temporal
domain as well. Typical examples are errors in duration judgments
or synchronization errors in tapping tasks. In addition, several
studies indicate the influence of attention on both the timing and
on the localization of dynamic events. Another intriguing question
originates from well-known interactions between intermodal events,
namely, whether these events are based on a single representation
or whether different representations interact.
The origins of knowledge about the self is arguably the most fundamental problem of psychology. It is a classic theme that has preoccupied great psychologists, beginning with William James and Freud. On reading current literature, today's developmental psychologists and ethologists are clearly expressing a renewed interest in the topic. Furthermore, recent progress in the study of infant and animal behavior, provides important and genuinely new insights regarding the origins of self-knowledge. This book is a collection of current theoretical views and research on the self in early infancy, prior to self-identification and the well-documented emergence of mirror self-recognition. The focus is on the early sense of self of the young infant. Its aim is to provide an account of recent research substantiating the precursors of self-recognition and self-identification. By concentrating on early infancy, the book provides an updated look at the origins of self-knowledge.
Since the end of the sixties, Piagetian general theory with its inherent power of unification has gradually given way to a multitude of more specific models which is in evidence today. In this volume the authors concentrate on three perspectives namely cognitive, perceptuo-motor and neuropsychological development and attempt to coordinate these traditionally separated views. Good illustrations of these theoretical connections can be found in different chapters although the persistent isolation of these three domains still remains. However the authors believe efforts in developmental psychology must continue in the direction of domain interaction, for theoretical concepts as well as methodological tools.
The book provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of
current research on cognitive and applied aspects of eye movements.
The contents include peer-reviewed chapters based on a selection of
papers presented at the 11th European Conference on Eye Movements
(Turku, Finland 2001), supplemented by invited contributions. The
ECEM conference series brings together researchers from various
disciplines with an interest to use eye-tracking to study
perceptual and higher order cognitive functions.
In the study of the computational structure of biological/robotic sensorimotor systems, distributed models have gained center stage in recent years, with a range of issues including self-organization, non-linear dynamics, field computing etc. This multidisciplinary research area is addressed here by a multidisciplinary team of contributors, who provide a balanced set of articulated presentations which include reviews, computational models, simulation studies, psychophysical, and neurophysiological experiments. The book is divided into three parts, each characterized by a slightly different focus: in part I, the major theme concerns computational maps which typically model cortical areas, according to a view of the sensorimotor cortex as "geometric engine" and the site of "internal models" of external spaces. Part II also addresses problems of self-organization and field computing, but in a simpler computational architecture which, although lacking a specialized cortical machinery, can still behave in a very adaptive and surprising way by exploiting the interaction with the real world. Finally part III is focused on the motor control issues related to the physical properties of muscular actuators and the dynamic interactions with the world. The reader will find different approaches on controversial issues, such as the role and nature of force fields, the need for internal representations, the nature of invariant commands, the vexing question about coordinate transformations, the distinction between hierachiacal and bi-directional modelling, and the influence of muscle stiffness.
It has been said more than once in psychology that one person's
effect is another person's error term. By minimising and
occasionally ignoring individual and group variability cognitive
psychology has yieled many fine achievements. However, when
investigators are working with special populations, the subjects,
and the unique nature of the sample, come into focus and become the
goal in itself. For developmental psychologists, gerontologists and
psychopathologists, research progresses with an eye on their target
populations of study. Yet every good study in any of these domains
inevitably has another dimension. Whenever a study is designed to
turn a spotlight on a special population, the light is also shed on
the mainstream from which the target deviates. This book examines what we can learn about general and universal phenomena in cognition and its brain substrates from examining the odd, the rare, the transient, the exceptional and the abnormal.
An integrated approach to the problems of vision and vehicle
control is presented in this volume.
This collection of 33 papers represents the most current thinking and research on the study of cognitive processing in bilingual individuals. The contributors include well-known figures in the field and promising new scholars, representing four continents and work in dozens of languages. Instead of the social, political, or educational implications of bilingualism, the focus is on how bilingual people (mostly adults) think and process language. |
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