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This book takes as a starting point, John Dewey's article, The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology, in which Dewey was calling for, in short, the utilisation of systems theories within psychology, theories of behaviour that capture its nature as a vastly-complex dynamic coordination of nested coordinations. This line of research was neglected as American psychology migrated towards behaviourism, where perception came to be thought of as being both a neural response to an external stimulus and a mediating neural stimulus leading to, or causing a muscular response. As such, perception becomes a question of how it is the perceiver creates neural representations of the physical world. Gestalt psych...
A novel proposal that the cognitive architecture for volition and cognition arises from particular kinds of social interaction and communication. In Open Minds, Wolfgang Prinz offers the novel claim that agency and intentionality are first perceived and understood in others, and that it is only through practices and discourses of social mirroring that individuals come to apply these features to themselves and to shape their architectures for volition and cognition accordingly. Developing a (social science) constructive approach within a (cognitive science) representational framework, Prinz argues that the architectures for agency (volition) and intentionality (cognition) arise from particula...
The shared platform of the articles collected in this volume is used to advocate a dynamical systems approach to cognition. It is argued that recent developments in cognitive science towards an account of embodiment, together with the general approach of complexity theory and dynamics, have a major impact on behavioral and cognitive science. The book points out that there are two domains that follow naturally from the stance of embodiment: first, coordination dynamics is an established empirical paradigm that is best able to aid the approach; second, the obvious goal-directedness of intelligent action (i.e., intentionality) is nicely addressed in the framework of the dynamical synergetic approach.
Without Miracles describes many remarkable examples of the fit of various structures, behaviors, and products of living organisms to their environments in a broad synthesis of humankind's attempt to understand the emergence of complex, adapted entities.
The shared platform of the articles collected in this volume is used to advocate a dynamical systems approach to cognition. It is argued that recent developments in cognitive science towards an account of embodiment, together with the general approach of complexity theory and dynamics, have a major impact on behavioral and cognitive science. The book points out that there are two domains that follow naturally from the stance of embodiment: first, coordination dynamics is an established empirical paradigm that is best able to aid the approach; second, the obvious goal-directedness of intelligent action (i.e., intentionality) is nicely addressed in the framework of the dynamical synergetic approach.
Drawing on sources from a wide range of disciplines, this first volume of a two volume tutorial on systems theory focuses on non-linear dynamical techniques for analysis of feedback processes, information flow, decision making, control theory, and modeling of human behavioral systems.
The expression 'Neural Networks' refers traditionally to a class of mathematical algorithms that obtain their proper performance while they 'learn' from examples or from experience. As a consequence, they are suitable for performing straightforward and relatively simple tasks like classification, pattern recognition and prediction, as well as more sophisticated tasks like the processing of temporal sequences and the context dependent processing of complex problems. Also, a wide variety of control tasks can be executed by them, and the suggestion is relatively obvious that neural networks perform adequately in such cases because they are thought to mimic the biological nervous system which is...
This book introduces affect control theory to lay readers of sociology, and additionally guides sociology specialists into the theory's deep structure. It is the most comprehensive available introduction to affect control theory, an important and expanding framework in sociology. The book describes in plain language how sociology's best developed cybernetic model can be used to interpret actions and emotions that arise in everyday life.
It has become a truism that the frozen optical diagram representation of vision is the worst possible picture of the way in which we visually interact with the environment. Even apart from our reaction to moving targets by pursuit movements, our visual behaviour can be said to be characterised by eye movements. We sample from our environment in a series of relatively brief fixations which move from one point to another in a series of extremely rapid jerks known as saccades. Many questions arising from this characteristic of vision are explored within this volume, including the question of how our visual world maintains its perceptual stability despite the drastic changes in input associated with these eye movements.
This volume represents the proceedings of a NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on the topic of "Motor Neuroscience" held at the Hotel San 15-24, 1990. The San Bastiano Hotel Bastiano, Calcatoggio (Corsica), September provided a beautiful setting for the ten day ASI in aresort on the west coast of Corsica, near the island's capital city of Ajaccio. The motivation of this ASI originated from the success of an ASI that we organized eleven years ago at Senanque Abbey in the south of France. Our earlier meeting was successful in providing some coherence to a widely scattered literature while providing up to date knowledge on motor control and learning. Our goal for the second ASI was essentially the same. We wanted to appraise the main theoretical ideas that currently characterize the field by bringing together many of the internationally known scientists who are doing much of the contemporary work. It is our hope that these proceedings will provide some conceptual unification to an expanding and diverse literature on motor control.