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Our ability to speak, write, understand speech and read is critical
to our ability to function in today's society. As such,
psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use
language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This
comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by
practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on
around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields,
who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last
decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language,
how average adults understand and produce language, how language is
represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in
terms of their language abilities and computer-based models of
language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced
researchers, graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who
are interested in the recent developments and the future of
psycholinguistics.
Our ability to speak, write, understand speech and read is critical
to our ability to function in today's society. As such,
psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use
language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This
comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by
practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on
around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields,
who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last
decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language,
how average adults understand and produce language, how language is
represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in
terms of their language abilities and computer-based models of
language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced
researchers, graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who
are interested in the recent developments and the future of
psycholinguistics.
The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a
paradigm shift for over a decade now. The traditional
information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer
metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream
approach. However, the dynamical-systems perspective on mental
activity is now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing it to
move beyond the trendy buzzwords that have become associated with
it. The Continuity of Mind will help to galvanize the forces of
dynamical systems theory, cognitive and computational neuroscience,
connectionism, and ecological psychology that are needed to
complete this paradigm shift.
In this book, Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending
a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking
about the day's events involves the coalescing of different
neuronal activation patterns over time, i.e., a continuous
state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point
attractors. As a result, the brain cannot help but spend most of
its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between
identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario
is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly
embedded in their environmental context in real time, the state
space (in which brief visitations of attractor basins are your
'thoughts') suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions, but
extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a
result, your moment-by-moment experience of the world around you,
even right now, can be described as a continuous trajectory through
a high-dimensional state space that comprises diverse mental
states.
Spivey has organized The Continuity of Mind to present a systematic
overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially
overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than
three distinct mental systems. As a result, the apparent partitions
that were once thought to separate mental constructs inevitably
turn out, upon closer inspection, to be fuzzy graded transitions.
The initial chapters provide first-hand demonstrations of the 'gray
areas' in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled
mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in
state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less
mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of
behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the
continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language
comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and
reasoning. The final chapters discuss what the mind itself must
look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents
are distributed in state space. The Continuity of Mind is essential
reading for those in the cognitive and neural sciences who want to
see where the Dynamical Cognition movement is taking us.
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