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
The effort to explain the imitative abilities of humans and other animals draws onfields as diverse as animal behavior, artificial intelligence, computer science, comparativepsychology, neuroscience,
The grand and sweeping claims of many relativists might seem to amount to the argument that everything is relative—except the thesis of relativism. In this book, Steven Hales defends relativism
Why do we cry at the movies? What is the best way to manage destructive feelings such as jealousy? Although emotions pervade our lives, their nature, causes, and effects have only recently been studi
In The Genesis of Animal Play, Gordon Burghardt examines the origins and evolution of play in humans and animals. He asks what play might mean in our understanding of evolution, the brain, behavioral
Contemporary philosophy of mind is dominated by anti- individualism, which holds that a subject's thoughts are determined not only by what is inside her head but also by aspects of her environment. D
Surveys show that our growing concern over protecting the environment is accompanied by a diminishing sense of human contact with nature. Many people have little commonsense knowledge about nature&md
Until the mid-1980s, AI researchers assumed that an intelligent system doing high-level reasoning was necessary for the coupling of perception and action. In this traditional model, cognition mediate
Human beings, like other organisms, are the products of evolution. Like other organisms, we exhibit traits that are the product of natural selection. Our psychological capacities are evolved traits a
Gary Hatfield examines theories of spatial perception from the seventeenth to thenineteenth century and provides a detailed analysis of the works of Kant and Helmholtz, who adoptedopposing stances on
Doreen Kimura provides an intelligible overview of what is known about the neural andhormonal bases of sex differences in behavior, particularly differences in cognitive ability.
The authors of The Origins of Grammar have pioneered one of themost important methodological advances in language learning in the past decade: the intermodalpreferential looking paradigm, which can b
A central thesis of this book on the cognitive neuroscience of attention is that attention is not a single entity, but a finite set of brain processes that interact mutually and with other brain proc
The last decade saw the arrival of a new player in the creation/evolution debate—the intelligent design creationism (IDC) movement, whose strategy is to act as "the wedge" to overturn
This book brings together an international group of neuroscientists and philosopherswho are investigating how the content of subjective experience is correlated with events in thebrain. The fundamenta
By the mid-1980s researchers from artificial intelligence, computer science, brainand cognitive science, and psychology realized that the idea of computers as intelligent machineswas inappropriate. Th
Western philosophy has long been divided between empiricists, who argue that human understanding has its basis in experience, and rationalists, who argue that reason is the source of knowledge. A cen
This text, based on a course taught by Randall O'Reilly and Yuko Munakata over the past several years, provides an in-depth introduction to the main ideas in the computational cognitive neuroscience.
"Some Pow'r did us the giftie grant/ To see oursels as others can't." With that play on Burns' famous line as a preface, Willard Van Orman Quine sets out to spin the yarn of his life so far
What does it mean to say that a certain set of spikes is the right answer to a computational problem? In what sense does a spike train convey information about the sensory world? Spikes begins by pro
