Beatrice de Gelder – författare

The face has long been considered the gateway to understanding human emotion and cognition. Body language is an equally powerful means of communication, however. Although faces and bodies can express themselves in many similar ways, examining their differences may be the best way to learn how bodies communicate. Exploring the body's role in perceiving and expressing emotion has opened broad new avenues for research in cognitive neuroscience. Emotions and the Body discusses the neural basis and temporal processing signatures of emotional body language by drawing on state-of-the-art research in the neuropsychology of emotional face and body disorders. Beatrice de Gelder explores a range of fascinating questions such as: How do facial and bodily expressions interact? What role does emotional body language play in social interaction? If body language is perceived even with limited attention and reduced visual awareness, as studies with patients have shown, then what is the nature of emotional experience, and how is awareness affected? Are some cultures less expressive in their body language? And are there notable gender and cultural differences in emotional body language, as is the case for facial expressions? Research on emotional body language shows that emotions are tools for adaptive action, and that they allow us to predict interactions with real, imagined, and virtual others. These data prompt de Gelder to consider virtual bodies as well as physical ones, including avatars and robots. The wide-ranging implications of her study will appeal especially to scholars and students of cognitive neuroscience, but also to those working in such related fields as information and communication technology, computer science, animation, and robotics.

Can we learn without consciousness? When the eminent neuropsychologist, Lawrence Weiskrantz first coined the term 'blindsight' to describe a condition whereby a patient could demonstrate that they were aware of some object, yet insist that they were completely unaware of its existence, the response from some in the scientific community was one of extreme skepticism. Even now, there are those who question the existence of unconscious (implicit) learning, and the topic remains one of the most actively researched and debated in psychology. In recent years evidence for unconscious processing across a range of sensory modalities have come from studies of vision, audition, memory, emotion, and action. Never before have these studies of unconscious processing in the different senses been brought together into a single volume. In a book dedicated to Lawrence Weiskrantz, some of the leading psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists of the day explain what we know about unconscious processing in the different senses. Including contributions from, amongst others, David Milner, Jon Driver, Alan Cowey, and Ray Dolan, the book presents a state of the art account of what we now know about 'the unconscious'. The book will provide a fascinating account for students and researchers in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy.

Mental representations are among the most mysterious entities involved in cognition. How is the brain’s model of the world formed, how is it used, how is it corrected, how essential is it to our knowledge of the world? Psychologists have been trying to comprehend the nature of these internal mechanisms by models of their own, which fall into three main categories: computational, biological, and constructivist. But whether these explanations draw on the experience of computer programming for artificial intelligence, or on an analysis of the interrelations between neurons in the brain, or on some mechanical or abstract analogy, the purpose is always to find the metaphor which is most useful in scientific and predictive terms.All these approaches are represented in Knowledge and Representation (originally published in 1982), which is designed to convey the full richness and variety of research at the time and theorizing in this area of cognitive psychology.

Originally published in 1995, this collection of papers introduced a new dimension to the understanding of reading by focusing on the relation between spoken and written language processing. New perspectives on speech and reading are introduced by highlighting aspects of the two linguistic skills that had received little attention in the past. The comparative perspective adopted in this collection presents an innovative focus on speech and the acquisition of alphabetic reading skill. Major new sources of evidence are discussed, like reading in nonconventional input modalities, braille reading, and speech processing in lip-reading. Contributors also discuss the reading process in non-alphabetic orthographies and the specifics of the reading acquisition problem in logographic or mixed writing systems (like Chinese and Japanese) and their relations to underlying speech representations. A central concern of all chapters is the role of phonological processes in different modalities and writings systems, and at different stages in the reading acquisition process. Drawing on expertise of the contributors, the book presents a novel and varied view of the achievements, the promises and the challenges facing the researcher once the intimate link between speech and reading comes to the foreground.