A Meaning Processing Approach to Cognition


Book Description

A cognitive psychologist and an industrial design engineer draw on their own experiences of cognition in the context of everyday life and work to explore how people attempt to find practical solutions for complex situations. The book approaches these issues by considering higher-order relations between humans and their ecologies such as satisfying, specifying, and affording. This approach is consistent with recent shifts in the worlds of technology and product design from the creation of physical objects to the creation of experiences. Featuring a wealth of bespoke illustrations throughout, A Meaning Processing Approach to Cognition bridges the gap between controlled laboratory experiments and real-world experience, by questioning the metaphysical foundations of cognitive science and suggesting alternative directions to provide better insights for design and engineering. An essential read for all students of Ecological Psychology or Cognitive Systems Design, this book takes the reader on a journey beyond the conventional dichotomy of mind and matter to explore what really matters.




What Matters?


Book Description

A cognitive psychologist and an industrial design engineer draw from their experiences trying to make technology work for people to reflect on the foundations of Cognitive Science and Product Design. This work is motivated by the sense that there is a large gap between the type of experiences studied in laboratories and experiences of people working with every day technology. This has led the authors to question the metaphysical foundations of cognitive science and to suggest alternative directions that might provide better insights for design. An important inspiration for this alternative direction is Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality described in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. This book takes the reader on a journey beyond the conventional dichotomy of mind and matter to explore a world of 'what matters' in hopes of inspiring the design of human-technology systems that work beautifully.




The Analogical Mind


Book Description

Analogy has been the focus of extensive research in cognitive science over the past two decades. Through analogy, novel situations and problems can be understood in terms of familiar ones. Indeed, a case can be made for analogical processing as the very core of cognition. This is the first book to span the full range of disciplines concerned with analogy. Its contributors represent cognitive, developmental, and comparative psychology; neuroscience; artificial intelligence; linguistics; and philosophy. The book is divided into three parts. The first part describes computational models of analogy as well as their relation to computational models of other cognitive processes. The second part addresses the role of analogy in a wide range of cognitive tasks, such as forming complex cognitive structures, conveying emotion, making decisions, and solving problems. The third part looks at the development of analogy in children and the possible use of analogy in nonhuman primates. Contributors Miriam Bassok, Consuelo B. Boronat, Brian Bowdle, Fintan Costello, Kevin Dunbar, Gilles Fauconnier, Kenneth D. Forbus, Dedre Gentner, Usha Goswami, Brett Gray, Graeme S. Halford, Douglas Hofstadter, Keith J. Holyoak, John E. Hummel, Mark T. Keane, Boicho N. Kokinov, Arthur B. Markman, C. Page Moreau, David L. Oden, Alexander A. Petrov, Steven Phillips, David Premack, Cameron Shelley, Paul Thagard, Roger K.R. Thompson, William H. Wilson, Phillip Wolff




Encyclopedia of Human Development


Book Description

The field of human development focuses on the growth and development of the human being including physical, social, psychological, and emotional development. Under the broad umbrella of the term human development you find countless topics that range from charting the emotional attachment of an infant to his or her parents and its long-term effects on well-being, media violence and adolescents′ behavior, or factors moderating the natural decline in physical and mental abilities associated with aging. The Encyclopedia of Human Development is the first comprehensive, authoritative, and informative reference work that presents state-of-the-art research and ready-to-use facts from the fields of psychology, individual and family studies, and education in a way that is not too technical. With more than 600 entries, this three-volume Encyclopedia covers topics as diverse as adolescence, cognitive development, education, family, gender differences, identity, longitudinal research, personality development, prenatal development, temperament, and more. Key Features Provides cross-disciplinary coverage, with contributions from experts in the fields of psychology, education, human development and family studies, and gerontology Highlights classic studies and theories and provides brief biographies of notable researchers and theorists Takes a lifespan approach by including several "anchor essays" that cover specific phases of development such as prenatal, infancy, childhood, adolescence, early and middle adulthood, later adulthood and aging Begins with an Introduction that details the scope, rationale, and audience for the work The cross-disciplinary field of human development is one that captures interest among and holds practical relevance for the general public as well as academia, therefore this engaging Encyclopedia will be a welcome addition to any academic or public library.




Semantic Cognition


Book Description

A mechanistic theory of the representation and use of semantic knowledge that uses distributed connectionist networks as a starting point for a psychological theory of semantic cognition.




Meaning and Cognition


Book Description

The aim of this book is to present significant aspects of cognitive grammar by adopting an interdisciplinary approach. The book provides an interplay of contributions by some exponents of cognitive grammar (Langacker, Croft, Wood, Geeraerts, Kövecses, Wildgen), and philosophers of language (Albertazzi, Marconi, Peruzzi, Violi) who, in most cases, share a phenomenological and Gestalt approach to the problem of semantics. The topics covered include themes that are central to the debate in cognitive grammar, such as, metaphor, construal operations, prototypicality, Gestalt schemes and field semantics. The book offers evidence to support the cognitive hypothesis in semantics and the existence of a close connection between the structures of perception and the categories of natural language. Because of the approach employed, with its consideration of borderline aspects among semantics, linguistics, theoretical reflection and historical analysis, the book marks out a route for a philosophical inquiry complementary to a cognitive approach to the semantics of natural language.




How the Body Shapes Knowledge


Book Description

This text explores the theory of embodied cognition, which suggests that human cognition is "grounded" in the neural pathways linked to bodily sensation.




The Cognitive Animal


Book Description

The fifty-seven original essays in this book provide a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition. The contributors include cognitive ethologists, behavioral ecologists, experimental and developmental psychologists, behaviorists, philosophers, neuroscientists, computer scientists and modelers, field biologists, and others. The diversity of approaches is both philosophical and methodological, with contributors demonstrating various degrees of acceptance or disdain for such terms as "consciousness" and varying degrees of concern for laboratory experimentation versus naturalistic research. In addition to primates, particularly the nonhuman great apes, the animals discussed include antelopes, bees, dogs, dolphins, earthworms, fish, hyenas, parrots, prairie dogs, rats, ravens, sea lions, snakes, spiders, and squirrels. The topics include (but are not limited to) definitions of cognition, the role of anecdotes in the study of animal cognition, anthropomorphism, attention, perception, learning, memory, thinking, consciousness, intentionality, communication, planning, play, aggression, dominance, predation, recognition, assessment of self and others, social knowledge, empathy, conflict resolution, reproduction, parent-young interactions and caregiving, ecology, evolution, kin selection, and neuroethology.




Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing


Book Description

First published in 1979. Basic research, at its essence, is exploration of the unknown. When it is successful, isolated pieces of reality are deciphered and described. Most of the history of an empirical discipline consists of probes into this darkness-some bold, others careful and systematic. Most of these efforts are initially incorrect. At best, they are distant approximations to a reality that may not be correctly specified for centuries. How, then, can we describe the fragmented knowledge that characterizes a scientific discipline for most of its history? A dynamic field of science is held together by its paradigm. The author’s think it is essential to adequate scientific education to teach paradigms, and believe that there is an effective method. The method emphasizes the integral nature, rather than the objective correctness, of a given set of consensual commitments. They believe that paradigmatic content can be effectively combined with the technical research literature commonly presented in scientific texts. This book represents the culmination of those beliefs.




Cognitive Approach to Natural Language Processing


Book Description

As natural language processing spans many different disciplines, it is sometimes difficult to understand the contributions and the challenges that each of them presents. This book explores the special relationship between natural language processing and cognitive science, and the contribution of computer science to these two fields. It is based on the recent research papers submitted at the international workshops of Natural Language and Cognitive Science (NLPCS) which was launched in 2004 in an effort to bring together natural language researchers, computer scientists, and cognitive and linguistic scientists to collaborate together and advance research in natural language processing. The chapters cover areas related to language understanding, language generation, word association, word sense disambiguation, word predictability, text production and authorship attribution. This book will be relevant to students and researchers interested in the interdisciplinary nature of language processing. - Discusses the problems and issues that researchers face, providing an opportunity for developers of NLP systems to learn from cognitive scientists, cognitive linguistics and neurolinguistics - Provides a valuable opportunity to link the study of natural language processing to the understanding of the cognitive processes of the brain