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More than one third of the human brain is devoted to the processes of seeing — vision is after all the main way in which we gather information about the world. But human vision is a dynamic process during which the eyes continually sample the environment. Where most books on vision consider it as a passive activity, this book focuses on vision as an ‘active’ process. It goes beyond most accounts of vision where the focus is on seeing, to provide an account of seeing AND looking. The book starts by pointing out the weaknesses in our traditional approaches to vision and the reason we need this new approach. It then gives a thorough description of basic details of the visual and oculomotor systems necessary to understand active vision. The book goes on to show how this approach can give a new perspective on visual attention, and how the approach has progressed in the areas of visual orienting, reading, visual search, scene perception, and neuropsychology. Finally, the book summarizes progress by showing how this approach sheds new light on the old problem of how we maintain perception of a stable visual world.

What conception of mental architecture can survive the evidence of neuroplasticity and neural reuse in the human brain? In particular, what sorts of modules are compatible with this evidence? This book shows how developmental and adult neuroplasticity, as well as evidence of pervasive neural reuse, force a revision to the standard conceptions of modularity and spell the end of a hardwired and dedicated language module. It argues from principles of both neural reuse and neural redundancy that language is facilitated by a composite of modules (or module-like entities), few if any of which are likely to be linguistically special, and that neuroplasticity provides evidence that (in key respects and to an appreciable extent) few if any of them ought to be considered developmentally robust, though their development does seem to be constrained by features intrinsic to particular regions of cortex (manifesting as domain-specific predispositions or acquisition biases). In the course of doing so, the book articulates a schematically and neurobiologically precise framework for understanding modules and their supramodular interactions.

In everyday life, and particularly in the modern workplace, information technology and automation increasingly mediate, augment, and sometimes even interfere with how humans interact with their environment. How to understand and support cognition in human–technology interaction is both a practically and socially relevant problem. The chapters in this volume frame this problem in adaptive terms: How are behavior and cognition adapted, or perhaps ill-adapted, to the demands and opportunities of an environment where interaction is mediated by tools and technology? The text draws heavily on the work of Egon Brunswik, a pioneer in ecological and cognitive psychology, as well as on modern refinements and extensions of Brunswikian ideas, including Hammond's Social Judgment Theory, Gigerenzer's Ecological Rationality and Anderson's Rational Analysis. Inspired by Brunswik's view of cognition as “coming to terms” with the “casual texture” of the external world, the chapters here provide quantitative and computational models and measures for studying how people come to terms with an increasingly technological ecology, and provide insights for supporting cognition and performance through design, training, and other interventions.

The central problem in the study of addiction is to explain why people repeatedly behave in ways they know are bad for them. For much of the previous century and until the present day, the majority of scientific and medical attempts to solve this problem were couched in terms of involuntary behavior; if people behave in ways they do not want, then this must be because the behavior is beyond their control and outside the realm of choice. An opposing tradition, which finds current support among scientists and scholars as well as members of the general public, is that so-called addictive behavior reflects an ordinary choice just like any other and that the concept of addiction is a myth. To these polarized views of addiction, the editors and chapter authors of this volume say “a plague on both your houses.” There has been an increasing recognition in recent literature on addiction that restricting possible conceptions of it to either of these extreme positions is unhelpful and is retarding progress on understanding the nature of addiction and what could be done about it. This book contains a range of views from philosophy, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and the law on what exactly this middle ground between free choice and no choice consists of and what its implications are for theory, practice, and policy on addiction. The result amounts to a profound change in our thinking on addiction and how its devastating consequences can be ameliorated.

The Aesthetic Animal answers the ultimate questions of why we adorn ourselves; embellish our things and surroundings; and produce art, music, song, dance, and fiction. Humans are aesthetic animals that spend vast amounts of time and resources on seemingly useless aesthetic activities. However, nature would not allow a species to waste precious time and effort on activities completely unrelated to the survival, reproduction, and well-being of that species. Consequently, the aesthetic impulse must have some important biological functions. An impulse is a natural, internal behavioral incentive that does not need external reward to exist. A number of observations indicate that the aesthetic impulse is exactly such an inherent part of human nature, and therefore it is a primary impulse in its own right with several important functions. The aesthetic impulse may guide us toward what is biologically good for us and help us choose the right fitness-enhancing items in our surroundings. It is a valid individual fitness indicator, as well as a unifying social group marker, and aesthetically skilled individuals get more mating possibilities, higher status, and more collaborative offers. This book is written in a lively and entertaining tone, and it presents an original and comprehensive synthesis of the empirical field, synthesizing data from archeology, cave art, anthropology, biology, ethology, and experimental and evolutionary psychology and neuro-aesthetics.

What do we do when we view a work of art? What does it mean to have an “aesthetic” experience? Are such experiences purely in the eye (and brain) of the beholder? Such questions have entertained philosophers for millennia and psychologists for over a century. More recently, with the advent of functional neuroimaging methods, a handful of ambitious brain scientists have begun to explore the neural correlates of such experiences. The notion of aesthetics is generally linked to the way art evokes an hedonic response—we like it or we don't. Of course, a multitude of factors can influence such judgments, such as personal interest, past experience, prior knowledge, and cultural biases. In this book, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists were asked to address the nature of aesthetic experiences from their own discipline's perspective. In particular, the scholars were asked to consider whether a multidisciplinary approach, an aesthetic science, could help connect mind, brain, and aesthetics. As such, this book offers an introduction to the way art is perceived, interpreted, and felt and approaches these mindful events from a multidisciplinary perspective.

We are surrounded by digital computers. They do many things well that humans do not and have transformed our lives. But all computers are not the same. Although digital computers dominate today’s world, alternative ways to “compute” might be better and more efficient than digital computation when mechanically performing those tasks, important to humans, that we think of as “cognition.” Cognition, after all, was originally developed to work with our own specific biological hardware. Digital computers require elaborate detailed instructions to work; they are flexible but not simple. Analog computers are designed to do specific tasks. They can be simple but not flexible. Hardware matters. The book discusses two classic kinds of computer, digital and analog, and gives examples of their history, functions, and limitations. The author suggest that when brain “hardware,” with its associated brain “software” work together, it could form a computer architecture that would be useful for the efficient performance of cognitive tasks. This book discusses the essentials of brain hardware—in particular, the cerebral cortex, where cognition lives—and how cortical structure can influence the form taken by the computational operations underlying cognition. Topics include association, understanding complex systems through analogy, formation of abstractions, and the biology of number and its use in arithmetic and mathematics. The author introduces novel “brain-like” control mechanisms: active associative search and traveling waves. There is discussion on computing across scales of organization from single neurons to brain regions containing millions of neurons.

The puzzle that motivates Agency and Joint Attention is how people are able at one and the same time to maintain their own sense of autonomy, taking responsibility for their own actions and distinguishing them from the actions of others, while still being able to understand, appreciate, and coordinate their thoughts and actions with other people. This volume emphasizes the special role of human self-reflective consciousness in this complex but central coordination.

This book proposes a new integrative framework for understanding and promoting creatively adaptive thinking. The mind is not only cognition, narrowly construed, but is deeply intermeshed with action, perception, and emotion. This means that optimal mental agility is realized at the dynamic intersection of environment, brain, and mind. Building on empirical research from the behavioral and brain sciences, from developmental and social psychology, and from neuropsychology, psychopathology, and allied disciplines, this book argues that understanding our agile minds requires that we go beyond dichotomous classifications of cognition as intuitive versus deliberate. When we are optimally creatively adaptive, we are able to adroitly move across not only a wide range of levels of cognitive control, but also across multiple levels of detail. Neither abstraction nor specificity, neither controlled nor automatic processes alone are what is needed. Contextually sensitive variation is essential, including rapidly intermixed modes of cognitive control, if we are to realize our fullest capacities for insightful innovation, fluent improvisation, and flexible thinking.

Through a comprehensive computational theory of the mind, namely, a computational “cognitive architecture”, this book explores cognitive or psychological mechanisms and processes. The goal of this book is to develop a unified framework for understanding the human mind, and within the unified framework, to develop process-based, mechanistic understanding of a variety of psychological phenomena. Specifically, the book first describes the essential CLARION framework and its cognitive-psychological justifications, then its computational instantiations, and finally its applications to capturing, simulating, and explaining various psychological phenomena and empirical data. Through the lens of a unified framework, the book shows how the models and simulations shed light on psychological mechanisms and processes. In fields ranging from cognitive science, to psychology, to artificial intelligence, and even to philosophy, academic researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and practitioners of various kinds may have interest in topics covered by this book. The book may also be suitable for seminars or courses at graduate or undergraduate levels on cognitive architectures or cognitive modeling (i.e., computational psychology).

In 1953 a young female Japanese macaque called Imo began washing sweet potatoes before eating them, presumably to remove dirt and sand grains. Soon other monkeys had adopted this behaviour, and potato washing gradually spread throughout the troop. When, three years after her first invention, Imo devised a second novel foraging behaviour, that of separating wheat from sand by throwing mixed handfuls into water and scooping out the floating grains, she was almost instantly heralded around the world as a ‘monkey genius’. Imo is probably the most celebrated of animal innovators. In fact, many animals will invent new behaviour patterns, adjust established behaviours to a novel context, or respond to stresses in an appropriate and novel manner. Innovation is an important component of behavioural flexibility, vital to the survival of individuals in species with generalist or opportunistic lifestyles, and potentially of critical importance to those endangered or threatened species forced to adjust to changed or impoverished environments. Innovation may also have played a central role in avian and primate brain evolution.

Humans have engaged in artistic and aesthetic activities since the appearance of our species. The expression of meaning using color, line, sound, rhythm, or movement constitutes a fundamental aspect of our species’ biological and cultural heritage. All known human societies have developed aesthetic systems that use diverse forms of visual representation, body art, music, literature, or performance to convey culturally important meaning. Art and aesthetics are, therefore, inherent constituents of the human mind, and contribute to our species’ identity, distinguishing it from its living and extinct relatives. Science faces the challenge of explaining the foundations of this trait and the way cultural processes nurture it into expression. How does the human brain bring about these sorts of behaviours? What neural processes underlie aesthetic appreciation? How does training modulate these processes? How are they impaired by brain lesions and neurodegenerative diseases? How did such neural underpinnings evolve? Are humans the only species capable of aesthetic appreciation, or are other species endowed with the rudiments of this capacity? Scientific aesthetics is today a thriving and respected research field. It has made substantial contributions to basic understanding of some of the unique features of the human mind, and to practical issues related to consumers’ decisions, judgments about others, and mate choice.

Language is one of the faculties that sets humans apart from animals, the crucial thing which makes our complex social interactions possible. This book explores the ways in which the mind produces and understands language: the ways in which the sounds of language evoke meaning, and the ways in which the desire to communicate causes us to produce those sounds to begin with. The ‘ascent’ symbolises different things: the progression from sound to meaning, the ascent that we each undergo, from birth onwards, as we learn our mother tongue, and the quest to understand the mental processes which underlie our use of language. The book leads this ascent — a fascinating tour which takes us from babies learning to say words to the production of spoken and written language, the effects of brain damage on language, and the ways in which computer simulations of interconnecting nerve cells can learn language.

Although many professionals in psychology (including the sub-disciplines of human learning and memory, clinical practice related to psychopathology, neuroscience, educational psychology and many other areas) no longer receive training in learning and conditioning, the influence of this field remains strong. Therefore, many researchers and clinicians have little knowledge about basic learning theory and its current applications beyond their own specific research topic. The primary purpose of the present volume is to highlight ways in which basic learning principles, methodology, and phenomena underpin, and indeed guide, contemporary translational research. With contributions from a distinguished collection of internationally renowned scholars, this twenty-three-chapter volume contains specific research issues but is also broad in scope, covering a variety of topics in which associative learning and conditioning theory apply, such as drug abuse and addiction, anxiety, fear and pain research, advertising, attribution processes, acquisition of likes and dislikes, social learning, psychoneuroimmunology, and psychopathology (e.g., autism, depression, helplessness, and schizophrenia). This breadth is captured in the titles of the three major sections of the book: Applications to Clinical Pathology; Applications to Health and Addiction; Applications to Cognition, Social Interaction, and Motivation. The critically important phenomena and methodology of learning and conditioning continue to have a profound influence on theory and clinical concerns related to the mechanisms of memory, cognition, education, and pathology of emotional and consummatory disorders.

The study of attention in the laboratory has been crucial to understanding the mechanisms that support several different facets of attentional processing: Our ability both to divide attention among multiple tasks and stimuli, and focus it selectively on task-relevant information, while ignoring distracting task-irrelevant information, as well as how top-down and bottom-up factors influence the way that attention is directed within and across modalities. Equally important, however, is research that has attempted to scale up to the real world this empirical work on attention that has traditionally been well controlled by limited laboratory paradigms and phenomena. These types of basic and theoretically guided applied research on attention have benefited immeasurably from the work of Christopher Wickens. This book honors Wickens' many important contributions to the study of attention by bringing together researchers who examine real-world attentional problems and questions in light of attentional theory. The research fostered by Wickens' contributions enrich not only our understanding of human performance in complex real-world systems, but also reveal the gaps on our knowledge of basic attentional processes.

For decades, the fundamental processes underlying memory and attention have been understood within an “information processing” framework in which information passes from one processing stage to another, leading eventually to a response. More recently, however, the attempt to build a general theoretical framework for information processing has been largely supplanted in favor of two more recent approaches: mathematical models of processing and direct investigations of brain function. This book reconciles theoretical conflicts in the literature to present an important, analytical update of the traditional information-processing approach by modifying it to incorporate the last few decades of research on memory, attention, and brain functioning. Throughout, the book cogently considers and ultimately refutes recent challenges to the fundamental assumption of the existence of special short-term memory and selective attention faculties. It also draws a key distinction between memory processes operating inside and outside of the focus of attention. The book hopes to foster an understanding of how memory and attention operate together, and how both functions are produced by brain processes.

Our ability to attend selectively to our surroundings is crucial if we are to negotiate the world around us in an efficient manner. Several aspects of the temporal dimension turn out to be critical in determining how we can put together and select the events that are important to us as they themselves unfold over time. For example, we often miss events that happen while we are occupied perceiving or responding to another stimulus. On the other hand, temporal regularity between events can also greatly improve our perception. In addition, our perception of the passage of time itself can also be distorted while we are performing actions or paying attention to different aspects of the environment. This interplay between ‘attention’ and ‘time’ has been relatively neglected in the psychology and neuroscience literatures until very recently. This book addresses this foundational topic, bringing together several hitherto fragmented findings into a cohesive field of enquiry. It contains thirty-one critical-review chapters, organised into three stand-alone, yet extensively cross-referenced, themed sections. Each section focuses on distinct ways in which attention and time influence one another. These sections, each encompassing a range of methodologies from classical cognitive psychology to single-cell neurophysiology, provide functionally unifying frameworks to help guide through the many various experimental and theoretical approaches adopted. Section 1 considers variations of attention across time; Section 2 describes several types of temporal illusion; and Section 3 examines how attention can be directed in time.

The study of attention is central to psychology. This book presents the science of attention in a larger social context, which includes our ability voluntarily to choose and act upon an object of thought. The volume is based on fifty years of research involving behavioral, imaging, developmental, and genetic methods. It describes three brain networks of attention that carry out the functions of obtaining and maintaining the alert state, orienting to sensory events, and regulating responses. The book ties these brain networks to anatomy, connectivity, development, and socialization, and includes material on pathologies that involve attentional networks as well as their role in education and social interaction.

Who benefits, and who loses, when emotions are described in particular ways? How can metaphors such as “hold on” and “let go” affect people’s emotional experiences? Banned Emotions draws on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology to challenge popular ideas about emotions that should supposedly be suppressed. This interdisciplinary book breaks taboos by exploring emotions in which people are said to “indulge”: self-pity, prolonged crying, chronic anger, grudge-bearing, bitterness, and spite. By focusing on metaphors for these emotions in classic novels, self-help books, and popular films, Banned Emotions exposes their cultural and religious roots. Examining works by Dante, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Forster, and Woolf in parallel with Bridesmaids, Fatal Attraction, and Who Moved My Cheese?, Banned Emotions reveals patterns in the ways emotions are represented that can make people so ashamed of feelings, they may stifle emotions that they need to work through. By analyzing the ways that physiology and culture combine in emotion metaphors, Banned Emotions shows that emotion regulation is a political as well as a biological issue. Banned Emotions considers the emotions of women abandoned by their partners and asks whether the psychological “attachment” metaphor is the best way to describe human relationships. Recent studies of emotion regulation indicate that reappraisal works better than suppression, which over time can damage a person’s health. Socially discouraged emotions such as self-pity emerge from lived experiences, often the experiences of people who hold less social power. Emotion metaphors like “move on” deflect attention from the social problems that have inspired emotions to the individuals who feel them—people who need to think about their emotions and their causes in the world.

Are people rational? This question was central to Greek thought and has been at the heart of psychology and philosophy for millennia. This book provides a radical and controversial reappraisal of conventional wisdom in the psychology of reasoning, proposing that the Western conception of the mind as a logical system is flawed at the very outset. It argues that cognition should be understood in terms of probability theory, the calculus of uncertain reasoning, rather than in terms of logic, the calculus of certain reasoning.