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Psychology

Why So Slow?

The Advancement of Women
By Virginia Valian

Why do so few women occupy positions of power and prestige? Virginia Valian uses concepts and data from psychology, sociology, economics, and biology to explain the disparity in the professional advancement of men and women. According to Valian, men and women alike have implicit hypotheses about gender differences—gender schemas—that create small sex differences in characteristics, behaviors, perceptions, and evaluations of men and women. Those small imbalances accumulate to advantage men and disadvantage women.

Reworking Authority

Leading and Following in the Post-Modern Organization
By Larry Hirschhorn

For many companies, the past decade has been marked by a sense of turbulence and redefinition. The growing role of information technologies and service businesses has prompted companies to reconsider how they are structured and even what business they are in. These changes have also affected how people work, what skills they need, and what kind of careers they expect. One critical change in how people work, argues Larry Hirschhorn, is that they are expected to bring more of themselves psychologically to the job.

Mind Readings

Introductory Selections on Cognitive Science
Edited by Paul Thagard

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.

Rethinking Innateness

A Connectionist Perspective on Development
By Jeffrey Elman, Elizabeth Bates, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi and Kim Plunkett


Rethinking Innateness asks the question, "What does it really mean to say that a behavior is innate?" The authors describe a new framework in which interactions, occurring at all levels, give rise to emergent forms and behaviors. These outcomes often may be highly constrained and universal, yet are not themselves directly contained in the genes in any domain-specific way.

Exercises in Rethinking Innateness

A Handbook for Connectionist Simulations
By Kim Plunkett and Jeffrey Elman

Mind Design II

Philosophy, Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence
Edited by John Haugeland

Mind design is the endeavor to understand mind (thinking, intellect) in terms of its design (how it is built, how it works). Unlike traditional empirical psychology, it is more oriented toward the "how" than the "what." An experiment in mind design is more likely to be an attempt to build something and make it work—as in artificial intelligence—than to observe or analyze what already exists. Mind design is psychology by reverse engineering.

Mindblindness

An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind
By Simon Baron-Cohen

foreword by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby


In Mindblindness, Simon Baron-Cohen presents a model of the evolution and development of "mindreading." He argues that we mindread all the time, effortlessly, automatically, and mostly unconsciously. It is the natural way in which we interpret, predict, and participate in social behavior and communication. We ascribe mental states to people: states such as thoughts, desires, knowledge, and intentions.

Cognition in the Wild

By Edwin Hutchins

Classroom Lessons

Integrating Cognitive Theory and Classroom Practice
Edited by Kate McGilly

A timely complement to John Bruer's Schools for Thought, Classroom Lessons documents eight projects that apply cognitive research to improve classroom practice. The chapter authors are all principal investigators in an influential research initiative on cognitive science and education. Classroom Lessons describes their collaborations with classroom teachers aimed at improving teaching and learning for students in grades K-12. The eight projects cover writing, mathematics, history, social science, and physics.

An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Second Edition

Thinking
Edited by Edward E. Smith and Daniel N. Osherson

An Invitation to Cognitive Science provides a point of entry into the vast realm of cognitive science, offering selected examples of issues and theories from many of its subfields. All of the volumes in the second edition contain substantially revised and as well as entirely new chapters.