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Wolfgang Prinz

Wolfgang Prinz is Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, and Honorary Professor at the Universities of Munich and Leipzig.

Titles by This Author

Open Minds

The Social Making of Agency and Intentionality
By Wolfgang Prinz

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.

Titles by This Editor

Action Science

Foundations of an Emerging Discipline
Edited by Wolfgang Prinz, Miriam Beisert and Arvid Herwig

The emerging field of action science is characterized by a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches that share the basic functional belief that evolution has optimized cognitive systems to serve the demands of action. This book brings together the constitutive approaches of action science in a single source, covering the relation of action to such cognitive functions as perception, attention, memory, and volition. Each chapter offers a tutorial-like description of a major line of inquiry, written by a leading scientist in the field.

Disorders of Volition

Edited by Natalie Sebanz and Wolfgang Prinz

Science tries to understand human action from two perspectives, the cognitive and the volitional. The volitional approach, in contrast to the more dominant "outside-in" studies of cognition, looks at actions from the inside out, examining how actions are formed and informed by internal conditions. In Disorders of Volition, scholars from a range of disciplines seek to advance our understanding of the processes supporting voluntary action by addressing conditions in which the will is impaired.