Frontiers of Cognitive Science – serie

This book offers an exciting new collection of recent research on the actual processes that humans use when making decisions in their everyday lives and in business situations. The contributors use cognitive psychological techniques to break down the constituent processes and set them in their social context. The contributors are from many different countries and draw upon a wide range of techniques, making this book a valuable resource to cognitive psychologists in applied settings, economists and managers.

The Nature of Concepts examines a central issue for all the main disciplines in cognitive science: how the human mind creates and passes on to other human minds a concept. An excellent cross-disciplinary collection with contributors including Steven Pinker, Andy Clarke and Henry Plotkin.

Evaluation, from connotations to complex judgements of value, is probably the most neglected dimension of meaning. Calling for a new understanding of truth and value, this book is a comprehensive study of evaluation in natural language, at lexical, syntactic and discursive levels. Jean Pierre Malrieu explores the cognitive foundations of evaluation and uses connectionist networks to model evaluative processes. He takes into account the social dimension of evaluation, showing that ideological contexts account for evaluative variability. A discussion of compositionality and opacity leads to the argument that a semantics of evaluation has some key advantages over truth-conditional semantics and as an example Malrieu applies his evaluative semantics to a complex Shakespeare text. His connectionist model yields a mathematical estimation of the consistency of text with ideology, and is particularly useful in the identification of subtle rhetorical devices such as irony.

This important work brings together international academics from a variety of disciplines to explore the topic of spatial cognition on a 'geographic' scale. It provides an overview of the historical origins of the subject, a description of current debates and suggests directions for future research.

This book offers an exciting new collection of recent research on the actual processes that humans use when making decisions in their everyday lives and in business situations. The contributors use cognitive psychological techniques to break down the constituent processes and set them in their social context. The contributors are from many different countries and draw upon a wide range of techniques, making this book a valuable resource to cognitive psychologists in applied settings, economists and managers.

Evaluation, from connotations to complex judgements of value, is probably the most neglected dimension of meaning. Calling for a new understanding of truth and value, this book is a comprehensive study of evaluation in natural language, at lexical, syntactic and discursive levels. Jean Pierre Malrieu explores the cognitive foundations of evaluation and uses connectionist networks to model evaluative processes. He takes into account the social dimension of evaluation, showing that ideological contexts account for evaluative variability. A discussion of compositionality and opacity leads to the argument that a semantics of evaluation has some key advantages over truth-conditional semantics and as an example Malrieu applies his evaluative semantics to a complex Shakespeare text. His connectionist model yields a mathematical estimation of the consistency of text with ideology, and is particularly useful in the identification of subtle rhetorical devices such as irony.

This important work brings together international academics from a variety of disciplines to explore the topic of spatial cognition on a 'geographic' scale. It provides an overview of the historical origins of the subject, a description of current debates and suggests directions for future research.

Can you learn without knowing it? This controversial and much debated question forms the basis of this collection of essays as the authors discuss whether the measurable changes in behaviour that result from learning can ever remain entirely unconscious. Three issues central to the topic of implicit learning are raised. Firstly, the extent to which learning can be unconscious, and therefore implicit, is considered. Secondly, theories are developed regarding the nature of knowledge acquired in implicit learning situations. Finally, the idea that there are two separable independent processing systems in the brain, for implicit and explicit learning, is considered.Implicit Learning and Consciousness challenges conventional wisdom and presents the most up-to-date studies to define, quantify and test the predictions of the main models of implicit learning. The chapters include a variety of research from computer modelling, experimental psychology and neural imaging to the clinical data resulting from work with amnesics. The result is a topical book that provides an overview of the debate on implicit learning, and the various philosophical, psychological and neurological frameworks in which it can be placed. It will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and the philosophical, psychological and modeling research community.

The Nature of Concepts examines a central issue for all the main disciplines in cognitive science: how the human mind creates and passes on to other human minds a concept. An excellent cross-disciplinary collection with contributors including Steven Pinker, Andy Clarke and Henry Plotkin.