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Cognition, Brain, & Behavior

  • The Distracted Mind
    Adam Gazzaley
    Larry D. Rosen

    Why our brains aren’t built for media multitasking, and how we can learn to live with technology in a more balanced way.

  • Dreaming
    Jennifer M. Windt

    A comprehensive proposal for a conceptual framework for describing conscious experience in dreams, integrating philosophy of mind, sleep and dream research, and interdisciplinary consciousness studies.

  • Minds without Meanings
    Jerry A. Fodor
    Zenon W. Pylyshyn

    Two prominent thinkers argue for the possibility of a theory of concepts that takes reference to be concepts’ sole semantic property.

  • Categorizing Cognition
    Graeme S. Halford
    William H. Wilson

    A proposal for a categorization of cognition based on core properties of the constituent processes that integrates theory and empirical findings across domains.

  • After Phrenology
    Michael L. Anderson

    A proposal for a fully post-phrenological neuroscience that details the evolutionary roots of functional diversity in brain regions and networks.

  • A Natural History of Natural Theology
    Helen De Cruz
    Johan De Smedt

    An examination of the cognitive foundations of intuitions about the existence and attributes of God.

  • Feeling Beauty
    G. Gabrielle Starr

    A theory of the neural bases of aesthetic experience across the arts, which draws on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry.

  • Touch
    Tiffany Field

    Why we need a daily dose of touch: an investigation of the effects of touch on our physical and mental well-being.

  • Late-Talking Children
    Stephen M. Camarata

    What parents need to know about the causes and treatment of children’s late talking: how to avoid misdiagnoses, navigate the educational system, and more.

  • The Conscious Mind
    Zoltan Torey

    An account of the emergence of the mind: how the brain acquired self-awareness, functional autonomy, the ability to think, and the power of speech.

Cognition, Brain, & Behavior

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Invisible Mind

Flexible Social Cognition and Dehumanization
By

In Invisible Minds, Lasana Harris takes a social neuroscience approach to explaining the worst of human behavior. How can a person take part in racially motivated violence and then tenderly cradle a baby or lovingly pet a puppy? Harris argues that our social cognition—the ability to infer the mental states of another agent—is flexible. That is, we can either engage or withhold social cognition. If we withhold social cognition, we dehumanize the other person.

Why Only Us

Language and Evolution
By and

“A loosely connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary phenomenon of language.”
—New York Review of Books

Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture

Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World
Edited by Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs and Christian Tewes

Recent accounts of cognition attempt to overcome the limitations of traditional cognitive science by reconceiving cognition as enactive and the cognizer as an embodied being who is embedded in biological, psychological, and cultural contexts. Cultural forms of sense-making constitute the shared world, which in turn is the origin and place of cognition. This volume is the first interdisciplinary collection on the cultural context of embodiment, offering perspectives that range from the neurophilosophical to the anthropological.

Moral Judgments as Educated Intuitions

By

Rationalists about the psychology of moral judgment argue that moral cognition has a rational foundation. Recent challenges to this account, based on findings in the empirical psychology of moral judgment, contend that moral thinking has no rational basis. In this book, Hanno Sauer argues that moral reasoning does play a role in moral judgment—but not, as is commonly supposed, because conscious reasoning produces moral judgments directly. Moral reasoning figures in the acquisition, formation, maintenance, and reflective correction of moral intuitions.

Consciousness

Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist
By

What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. This engaging book—part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation—describes Koch's search for an empirical explanation for consciousness.

Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind

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With Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind, David Herman proposes a cross-fertilization between the study of narrative and research on intelligent behavior. This cross-fertilization goes beyond the simple importing of ideas from the sciences of mind into scholarship on narrative and instead aims for convergence between work in narrative studies and research in the cognitive sciences. The book as a whole centers on two questions: How do people make sense of stories? And: How do people use stories to make sense of the world?

Positive Computing

Technology for Wellbeing and Human Potential
By and

On the eve of Google’s IPO in 2004, Larry Page and Sergey Brin vowed not to be evil. Today, a growing number of technologists would go further, trying to ensure that their work actively improves people’s lives. Technology, so pervasive and ubiquitous, has the capacity to increase stress and suffering; but it also has the less-heralded potential to improve the well-being of individuals, society, and the planet.

The Geometry of Meaning

Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces
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In The Geometry of Meaning, Peter Gärdenfors proposes a theory of semantics that bridges cognitive science and linguistics and shows how theories of cognitive processes, in particular concept formation, can be exploited in a general semantic model. He argues that our minds organize the information involved in communicative acts in a format that can be modeled in geometric or topological terms—in what he terms conceptual spaces, extending the theory he presented in an earlier book by that name.

Language Acquisition, Second Edition

The Growth of Grammar
By

How do children begin to use language? How does knowledge of language emerge in early infancy, and how does it grow? This textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to knowledge acquisition, drawing on empirical evidence and linguistic theory. The theoretical framework used is the generative theory of Universal Grammar; students should have some familiarity with concepts in linguistic research. Aimed at upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, the book offers end-of-chapter summaries, key words, study questions, and exercises.

Becoming Fluent

How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language
By and

Adults who want to learn a foreign language are often discouraged because they believe they cannot acquire a language as easily as children. Once they begin to learn a language, adults may be further discouraged when they find the methods used to teach children don’t seem to work for them. What is an adult language learner to do? In this book, Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuz draw on insights from psychology and cognitive science to show that adults can master a foreign language if they bring to bear the skills and knowledge they have honed over a lifetime.

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