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After Phrenology
The computer analogy of the mind has been as widely adopted in contemporary cognitive neuroscience as was the analogy of the brain as a collection of organs in phrenology. Just as the phrenologist would insist that each organ must have its particular function, so contemporary cognitive neuroscience is committed to the notion that each brain region must have its fundamental computation. InAfter Phrenology, Michael Anderson argues that to achieve a fully post-phrenological science of the brain, we need to reassess this commitment and devise an alternate, neuroscientifically grounded taxonomy of mental function. Anderson contends that the cognitive roles played by each region of the brain are highly various, reflecting different neural partnerships established under different circumstances. He proposes quantifying the functional properties of neural assemblies in terms of their dispositional tendencies rather than their computational or information-processing operations. Exploring larger-scale issues, and drawing on evidence from embodied cognition, Anderson develops a picture of thinking rooted in the exploitation and extension of our early-evolving capacity for iterated interaction with the world. He argues that the multidimensional approach to the brain he describes offers a much better fit for these findings, and a more promising road toward a unified science of minded organisms.
eBook
Handbook of categorization in cognitive science
Categorization, the basic cognitive process of arranging objects into categories, is a fundamental process in human and machine intelligence and is central to investigations and research in cognitive science.
eBook
The Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics
\"Our ability to speak, write, understand speech, and read is critical to our ability to function in today's society. As such, psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields, who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language, how average adults understand and produce language, how language is represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in terms of their language abilities, and computer-based models of language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced researchers, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates who are interested in the recent developments and the future of psycholinguistics\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Haptic communication between humans is tuned by the hard or soft mechanics of interaction
To move a hard table together, humans may coordinate by following the dominant partner's motion [1-4], but this strategy is unsuitable for a soft mattress where the perceived forces are small. How do partners readily coordinate in such differing interaction dynamics? To address this, we investigated how pairs tracked a target using flexion-extension of their wrists, which were coupled by a hard, medium or soft virtual elastic band. Tracking performance monotonically increased with a stiffer band for the worse partner, who had higher tracking error, at the cost of the skilled partner's muscular effort. This suggests that the worse partner followed the skilled one's lead, but simulations show that the results are better explained by a model where partners share movement goals through the forces, whilst the coupling dynamics determine the capacity of communicable information. This model elucidates the versatile mechanism by which humans can coordinate during both hard and soft physical interactions to ensure maximum performance with minimal effort.
Journal Article
Minds make societies : how cognition explains the world humans create
A scientist integrates evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies.
\"There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature.\" Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book.
Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles. In fascinating, thought-provoking passages, he explores questions such as: Why is there conflict between groups? Why do people believe low-value information such as rumors? Why are there religions? What is social justice? What explains morality? Boyer provides a new picture of cultural transmission that draws on the pragmatics of human communication, the constructive nature of memory in human brains, and human motivation for group formation and cooperation.
\"Cool and captivating…It will change forever your understanding of society and culture.\"—Dan Sperber, co-author of The Enigma of Reason
\"It is highly recommended…to researchers firmly settled within one of the many single disciplines in question. Not only will they encounter a wealth of information from the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, but the book will also serve as an invitation to look beyond the horizons of their own fields.\"—Eveline Seghers, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
eBook
The brain and the meaning of life
Why is life worth living? What makes actions right or wrong? What is reality and how do we know it? 'The Brain and the Meaning of Life' draws on research in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to answer some of the most pressing questions about life's nature and value.
Book
Generalizable representations of pain, cognitive control, and negative emotion in medial frontal cortex
The medial frontal cortex, including anterior midcingulate cortex, has been linked to multiple psychological domains, including cognitive control, pain, and emotion. However, it is unclear whether this region encodes representations of these domains that are generalizable across studies and subdomains. Additionally, if there are generalizable representations, do they reflect a single underlying process shared across domains or multiple domain-specific processes? We decomposed multivariate patterns of functional MRI activity from 270 participants across 18 studies into study-specific, subdomain-specific, and domain-specific components and identified latent multivariate representations that generalized across subdomains but were specific to each domain. Pain representations were localized to anterior midcingulate cortex, negative emotion representations to ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and cognitive control representations to portions of the dorsal midcingulate. These findings provide evidence for medial frontal cortex representations that generalize across studies and subdomains but are specific to distinct psychological domains rather than reducible to a single underlying process.
Journal Article