The term "folkbiology" refers to people's everyday understanding of the biological world--how they perceive, categorize, and reason about living kinds. The study of folkbiology not only sheds light on human nature, it may ultimately help us make the transition to a global economy without irreparably damaging the environment or destroying local cultures.This book takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together the work of researchers in anthropology, cognitive and developmental psychology, biology, and philosophy of science. The issues covered include: Are folk taxonomies a first-order approximation to classical scientific taxonomies, or are they driven more directly by utilitarian concerns? How are these category schemes linked to reasoning about natural kinds? Is there any nontrivial sense in which folk-taxonomic structures are universal? What impact does science have on folk taxonomy? Together, the chapters present the current foundations of folkbiology and indicate new directions in research.Contributors: Scott Atran, Terry Kit-fong Au, Brent Berlin, K. David Bishop, John D. Coley, Jared Diamond, John Dupr, Roy Ellen, Susan A. Gelman, Michael T. Ghiselin, Grant Gutheil, Giyoo Hatano, Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, David L. Hull, Eugene Hunn, Kayoko Inagaki, Frank C. Keil, Daniel T. Levin, Elizabeth Lynch, Douglas L. Medin, Julia Beth Proffitt, Bethany A. Richman, Laura F. Romo, Sandra R. Waxman.

This volume presents a variety of perspectives from within and outside moral psychology. Recently there has been an explosion of research in moral psychology, but it is one of the subfields most in need of bridge-building, both within and across areas. Interests in moral phenomena have spawned several separate lines of research that appear to address similar concerns from a variety of perspectives. The contributions to this volume examine key theoretical and empirical issues these perspectives share that connect these issues with the broader base of theory and research in social and cognitive psychology.

The first two chapters discuss the role of mental representation in moral judgment and reasoning. Sloman, Fernbach, and Ewing argue that causal models are the canonical representational medium underlying moral reasoning, and Mikhail offers an account that makes use of linguistic structures and implicates legal concepts. Bilz and Nadler follow with a discussion of the ways in which laws, which are typically construed in terms of affecting behavior, exert an influence on moral attitudes, cognition, and emotions.

Baron and Ritov follow with a discussion of how people's moral cognition is often driven by law-like rules that forbid actions and suggest that value-driven judgment is relatively less concerned by the consequences of those actions than some normative standards would prescribe. Iliev et al. argue that moral cognition makes use of both rules and consequences, and review a number of laboratory studies that suggest that values influence what captures our attention, and that attention is a powerful determinant of judgment and preference. Ginges follows with a discussion of how these value-related processes influence cognition and behavior outside the laboratory, in high-stakes, real-world conflicts.

Two subsequent chapters discuss further building blocks of moral cognition. Lapsley and Narvaez discuss the development of moral characters in children, and Reyna and Casillas offer a memory-based account of moral reasoning, backed up by developmental evidence. Their theoretical framework is also very relevant to the phenomena discussed in the Sloman et al., Baron and Ritov, and Iliev et al. chapters.

The final three chapters are centrally focused on the interplay of hot andcold cognition. They examine the relationship between recent empirical findings in moral psychology and accounts that rely on concepts and distinctions borrowed from normative ethics and decision theory. Connolly and Hardman focus on bridge-building between contemporary discussions in the judgment and decision making and moral judgment literatures, offering several useful methodological and theoretical critiques. Ditto, Pizarro, and Tannenbaum argue that some forms of moral judgment that appear objective and absolute on the surface are, at bottom, more about motivated reasoning in service of some desired conclusion. Finally, Bauman and Skitka argue that moral relevance is in the eye of the perceiver and emphasize an empirical approach to identifying whether people perceive a given judgment as moral or non-moral. They describe a number of behavioral implications of people's reported perception that a judgment or choice is a moral one, and in doing so, they suggest that the way in which researchers carve out the moral domain "a priori" might be dubious."

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. Volume 40 includes in its coverage chapters on memory, categorization, implicit and explicit learning, and the effects of rewards and punishments on learning.

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. Volume 39 includes in its coverage chapters on category learning, relational timing, infant memory, depression and memory, goals and choice, and more.

General Description of the Series
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.
General Description of the Volume
Volume 38 covers emotional memory, metacomprehension of text, and intertemporal choice.

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 contributions to this volume are concerned with perceptual learning in humans and machines. As people gain experience in the world, their perceptual abilities are often times radically transformed. Children organize their perceptual world differently from adults, and experts often have unique perceptual skills within their domain of expertise.;In a variety of ways, the contributors to this volume argue that perceptual abilities, rather than being fixed and stable, are flexible and influenced by tasks, needs and environment. This book focuses on recent research techniques for exploring the mechanisms that drive perceptual learning in humans. It creates a synthesis between empirical research and formal modelling. Collectively, the contributions reflect an interdisciplinary approach to the problem of perceptual learning, describing research from developmental psychology, adult perception, language acquisition, expert/novice differences, computational modelling and neuroscience.

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. Volume 35 covers spatial working memory, memory for asymmetric events, distance and location processes in memory, category learning, and visual spatial attention.

The Psychology of Learning and Motivation publishes empirical and theoretical contributions in cognitive and experimental psychology, ranging from classical and instrumental conditions to complex learning and problem solving. This guest-edited special volume is devoted to current research and discussion on associative versus cognitive accounts of learning. Written by major investigators in the field, topics include all aspects of causal learning in an open forum in which different approaches are brought together.
Key Features
* Up-to-date review of the literature
* Discusses recent controversies
* Presents major advances in understanding causal learning
* Synthesizes contrasting approaches
* Includes important empirical contributions
* Written by leading researchers in the field

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. Volume 33 includes in its coverage early symbol understanding and its use, word identification reflex, and prospective memory.
Key Features
* Early symbol understanding and its use
* Word identification reflex
* Prospective memory

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. Volume 31 covers children's representations of groups, diagnostic reasoning in medical expertise, and object representation.

With a long-standing tradition for excellence, this series is a collection of quality papers that are widely read by researchers in cognitive and experimental psychology. Each chapter thoughtfully integrates the writings of leading contributors, who present and discuss significant bodies of research relevant to their discipline.

The objective of the series has always been to provide a forum in which leading contributors to an area can write about significant bodies of research in which they are involved. The operating procedure has been to invite contributions from interesting, active investigators, and then allow them essentially free rein to present their perspectives on important research problems. The result of such invitations over the past two decades has been collections of papers which consist of thoughtful integrations providing an overview of a particular scientific problem. The series has a tradition of high quality papers and is widely read bv researchers in cognitive and experimental psychology.;This volume in the series includes topics such as: models of data- driven category learning and processing; data-driven and theory-driven processing and processing models, and concepts, category boundaries and conceptual combination.

The objective of the series has always been to provide a forum in which leading contributors to an area can write about significant bodies of research in which they are involved. The operating procedure has been to invite contributions from interesting, active investigators, and then allow them essentially free rein to present their perspectives on important research problems. The result of such invitations over the past two decades has been collections of papers which consist of thoughtful integrations providing an overview of a particular scientific problem. The series has an excellent tradition of high quality papers and is widely read by researchers incognitive and experimental psychology. The volume presents research ranging from classical and instrumental conditioning to complex learning and problem solving. Topics covered fall within a wide range of disciplines from neuroscience to artificial intelligence.

Analysis and case studies show that including different orientations toward the natural world makes for more effective scientific practice and science education. The answers to scientific questions depend on who's asking, because the questions asked and the answers sought reflect the cultural values and orientations of the questioner. These values and orientations are most often those of Western science. In Who's Asking?, Douglas Medin and Megan Bang argue that despite the widely held view that science is objective, value-neutral, and acultural, scientists do not shed their cultures at the laboratory or classroom door; their practices reflect their values, belief systems, and worldviews. Medin and Bang argue further that scientist diversity-the participation of researchers and educators with different cultural orientations-provides new perspectives and leads to more effective science and better science education. Medin and Bang compare Native American and European American orientations toward the natural world and apply these findings to science education. The European American model, they find, sees humans as separated from nature; the Native American model sees humans as part of a natural ecosystem. Medin and Bang then report on the development of ecologically oriented and community-based science education programs on the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin and at the American Indian Center of Chicago. Medin and Bang's novel argument for scientist diversity also has important implications for questions of minority underrepresentation in science.

An analysis of the cognitive consequences of diminished contact with nature examines the relationship between how people think about the natural world and how they act on it, and how these are affected by cultural differences. Surveys show that our growing concern over protecting the environment is accompanied by a diminishing sense of human contact with nature. Many people have little commonsense knowledge about nature-are unable, for example, to identify local plants and trees or describe how these plants and animals interact. Researchers report dwindling knowledge of nature even in smaller, nonindustrialized societies. In The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature, Scott Atran and Douglas Medin trace the cognitive consequences of this loss of knowledge. Drawing on nearly two decades of cross-cultural and developmental research, they examine the relationship between how people think about the natural world and how they act on it and how these are affected by cultural differences. These studies, which involve a series of targeted comparisons among cultural groups living in the same environment and engaged in the same activities, reveal critical universal aspects of mind as well as equally critical cultural differences. Atran and Medin find that, despite a base of universal processes, the cultural differences in understandings of nature are associated with significant differences in environmental decision making as well as intergroup conflict and stereotyping stemming from these differences. The book includes two intensive case studies, one focusing on agro-forestry among Maya Indians and Spanish speakers in Mexico and Guatemala and the other on resource conflict between Native-American and European-American fishermen in Wisconsin. The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature offers new perspectives on general theories of human categorization, reasoning, decision making, and cognitive development.