Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications

by Anderson, John R.

• ISBN13: 9781464148910
• ISBN10: 1464148910
• Edition: 8th
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-10-08
• Publisher: Worth Publishers

Summary

Head to the forefront of the study of cognition as Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications incorporates the latest theoretical breakthroughs, research findings, and technological advances, while marking the increasing role of neuroscience in the study of cognitive functions.

Author Biography

John Richard Anderson is Richard King Mellon Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is known for developing the ACT-R, which is the most widely used cognitive architecture in cognitive science. Anderson was also an early leader in research on intelligent tutoring systems, and computer systems based on his cognitive tutors are currently used by more than 500,000 mathematics students. He has served as President of the Cognitive Science Society, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He has received numerous awards including the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Career Award, the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Formal Analysis of Human Cognition, and the inaugural Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science. He is the editor of the Psychological Review.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. The Science of Cognition
Motivations for Studying Cognitive Psychology
The History of Cognitive Psychology
Information Processing; The Communicative Neurons
Organization of the Brain
Methods in Cognitive Neuroscience

2. Perception
Visual Perception in the Brain
Visual Pattern Recognition
Implications: Separating humans from BOTs
Speech Recognition
Feature Analysis of Speech 
Categorical Perception
Context and Pattern Recognition
Conclusions

3. Attention and Performance
Serial Bottlenecks
Auditory Attention
Visual Attention
Central Attention: Selecting Lines of Thought to Pursue
Implications: Why is cell phone use and driving a dangerous combination?
Conclusions

4. Mental Imagery
Verbal Imagery Versus Visual Imagery
Implications: Using brain activation to read people’s minds 
Visual Imagery
Conclusions: Visual Perception and Visual Imagery

5. Representation of Knowledge
Knowledge and Regions of the Brain
Memory for Meaningful Interpretations of Events
Implications: Mnemonic techniques for remembering vocabulary items
Propositional Representations
Embodied Cognition
Conceptual Knowledge
Conclusions

6. Human Memory: Encoding and Storage
Memory and the Brain
Sensory Memory Holds Information Briefly
Working Memory Holds the Information Needed to Perform a Task
Activation and Long-Term Memory
Practice and Memory Strength
Factors Influencing Memory
Implications: How does the method of loci help us organize recall? 
Flashbulb Memories
Conclusions

7. Human Memory: Retention and Retrieval
Are Memories Really Forgotten?
The Retention Function
How Interference Affects Memory 
Retrieval and Inference
Implications: How have advertisers used knowledge of cognitive psychology?
Associative Structure and Retrieval
The Hippocampal Formation and Amnesia
Implicit Versus Explicit Memory
Conclusions: The Many Varieties of Memory in the Brain

8. Problem Solving
The Nature of Problem Solving
Problem-Solving Operators
Operator Selection
Problem Representation
Set Effects
Conclusions
Appendix: Solutions

9. Expertise
Brain Changes with Skill Acquisition
General Characteristics of Skill Acquisition
The Nature of Expertise
Implications: Computers achieve chess expertise differently than humans 
Transfer of Skill
Theory of Identical Elements
Educational Implications
Conclusions

10. Reasoning
Reasoning and the Brain
Reasoning About Conditionals
Deductive Reasoning: Reasoning About Quantifiers
Inductive Reasoning and Hypothesis Testing
Implications: How convincing is a 90% result? 
Dual-Process Theories
Conclusions

11. Decision Making
The Brain and Decision Making
Probabilistic Judgment
Making Decisions Under Uncertainty
Implications: Why are adolescents more likely to make bad decisions?
Conclusions

12. Language Structure
Language and the Brain
The Field of Linguistics
Syntactic Formalisms
What is So Special About Human Language?
Implications: Ape language and the ethics of experimentation
The Relation Between Language and Thought
Language Acquisition
Conclusions: The Uniqueness of Language: A Summary

13. Language Comprehension
Brain and Language Comprehension
Parsing
Implications: Intelligent chatterboxes
Utilization
Text Processing
Situation Models
Conclusions

14. Individual Differences in Cognition
Cognitive Development
Psychometric Studies of Cognition
Implications: Does IQ determine success in life? 
Conclusions

Glossary
References
Name Index
Subject Index