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The human imagination remains one of the last uncharted terrains of the mind. This accessible and original monograph explores a central aspect of the imagination, the creation of counterfactual alternatives to reality, and claims that imaginative thoughts are guided by the same principles that underlie rational thoughts. Research has shown that rational thought is more imaginative than cognitive scientists had supposed; in The Rational Imagination, Ruth Byrne argues that imaginative thought is more rational than scientists have imagined. People often create alternatives to reality and imagine how events might have turned out "if only" something had been different. Byrne explores the "fault l...
This Element is on new developments in the psychology of reasoning that raise or address philosophical questions. In traditional studies in the psychology of reasoning, the focus was on inference from arbitrary assumptions and not at all from beliefs, and classical binary logic was presupposed as the only standard for human reasoning. But recently a new Bayesian paradigm has emerged in the discipline. This views ordinary human reasoning as mostly inferring probabilistic conclusions from degrees of beliefs, or from hypothetical premises relevant to a purpose at hand, and as often about revising or updating degrees of belief. This Element also covers new formulations of dual-process theories of the mind, stating that there are two types of mental processing, one rapid and intuitive and shared with other animals, and the other slow and reflective and more characteristic of human beings. The final topic covered is the new developments and rationality.
Mind Readings is a collection of accessible readings on some of the most important topics in cognitive science. Although anyone interested in the interdisciplinary study of mind will find the selections well worth reading, they work particularly well with Paul Thagard's textbook Mind: An Introduction Cognitive Science, and provide further discussion on the major topics discussed in that book. The first eight chapters present approaches to cognitive science from the perspective that thinking consists of computational procedures on mental representations. The remaining five chapters discuss challenges to the computational-representational understanding of mind. Contributors John R. Anderson, Ruth M.J. Byrne, E.H. Durfee, Chris Eliasmith, Owen Flanagan, Dedre Gentner, Janice Glasgow, Philip N. Johnson-Laird, Alan Mackworth, Arthur B. Markman, Douglas L. Medin, Keith Oatley, Dimitri Papadias, Steven Pinker, David E. Rumelhart, Herbert A. Simon.
Thinking and Reasoning in Autism provides fresh insights into the cognitive processes that underlie some of the typical characteristics of autism. Autism has long been considered an enigma, and no single theory so far has been able to explain, or even fully describe, the key characteristics of the autistic mind. From the interdisciplinary perspective of new research in cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience, this book explores thinking, reasoning and decision making in autism. The new cognitive approaches challenge some of the existing assumptions of the nature of thought in autism, including presumed areas of impairments. Instead, this book focuses on the nuanced ar...
Use of visual information is used to augment our knowledge, decide on our actions, and keep track of our environment. Even with eyes closed, people can remember visual and spatial representations, manipulate them, and make decisions about them. The chapters in Volume 42 of Psychology of Learning and Motivation discuss the ways cognition interacts with visual processes and visual representations, with coverage of figure-ground assignment, spatial and visual working memory, object identification and visual search, spatial navigation, and visual attention.
Movements of the Mind is about what it is to be an agent. Focusing on mental agency, it integrates multiple approaches, from philosophical analysis of the metaphysics of agency to the activity of neurons in the brain. Philosophical and empirical work are combined to generate concrete explanations of key features of the mind. The book should be relevant and accessible to philosophers and scientists interested in mind and agency. Wu argues that actions have a core psychological structure where attention plays a necessary role in guiding the agent's response and intentions function as memory for work, a practical memory. Attention and memory are accordingly central parts of an agent's intention...
Provides a comprehensive understanding of the informal logics of meaningful perception and autistic perception, which promises to pave the way for social scientists to begin addressing the subjective human experience in logical terms.
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.
This bk, which offers one of the 1st systematic attempts to discuss the role of strategies for deductive reasoning & brings together theoretical & empirical research, will be of interest to researchers/advanced students of cognitive psych.
Imagination occupies a central place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle. However, following a period of relative neglect there has been an explosion of interest in imagination in the past two decades as philosophers examine the role of imagination in debates about the mind and cognition, aesthetics and ethics, as well as epistemology, science and mathematics. This outstanding Handbook contains over thirty specially commissioned chapters by leading philosophers organised into six clear sections examining the most important aspects of the philosophy of imagination, including: Imagination in historical context: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl, and Sartre What is imagination? The r...