Macquarie Monographs in Cognitive Science – serie

Cognitive neuropsychological research studies of people with cognitive deficits have typically been directed either at investigating methods of intervention, or at furthering our understanding of normal and impaired cognition. This book reports on research that combines these goals, using studies that use intervention as a ‘tool’ for investigating hypotheses about the functioning of the human cognitive system. The introductory chapter discusses some of the unique and more general difficulties that this approach faces, while the five reports describe intervention studies with children and adults with cognitive impairments – studies which investigate current theories of cognition. The studies demonstrate that the use of intervention to study cognition is a promising and valuable methodology. Aiming to promote wider use of these combined methods, this book makes it clear that while the approach faces various methodological and interpretative challenges, it has the advantage of providing advances on issues of theory while, at the same time providing treatment to participants, and bringing together what have been largely separate research traditions. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology.

This indispensable textbook provides the underpinning knowledge to support all teaching assistants working towards Level 2 of the National Occupational Standards. This new edition is fully revised and extended to incorporate and respond to all new materials required to meet the 2007 standards. Taking into account current initiatives including Workforce Remodelling and the Every Child Matters agenda, the book can be used to support NVQs, or other Teaching Assistant awards at level 2, or can be used simply to supplement good practice.This accessible companion: actively engages the reader in activities, developing reflective practice while giving the theoretical background to school-based workgives insight and information about pupils’ individual needshelps teaching assistants develop curriculum-based skills to enable more effective classroom supportemphasises that teaching assistants are team members, supporting the school and being supported by the school. Contributions from specialist advisers ensure that the ideas and techniques are up to date, relevant and the best practice. All phases of education are covered, from the early years to later secondary years, and references are made to sources of further information throughout the book.The Essential Guide for Competent Teaching Assistants is invaluable in supporting both study and everyday practice. It will also be useful to training providers, teachers and school managers supporting Teaching Assistants in their professional development.

Over the last fifteen years, developmentalists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, educators and clinicians have considered the acquisition of a theory of mind - the capacity to predict and explain behavior on the basis of internal, subjective mental states - to be one of the crucial cognitive achievements of early childhood. This volume represents the first collection of work to address, empirically and conceptually, the topic of individual differences in theory of mind. It is also unique because it takes the reader beyond the preschool years, to explore theory of mind development in late childhood and adulthood.

Masked priming has a short and somewhat controversial history. When used as a tool to study whether semantic processing can occur in the absence of conscious awareness, considerable debate followed, mainly about whether masked priming truly tapped unconscious processes. For research into other components of visual word processing, however - in particular, orthographic, phonological, and morphological - a general consensus about the evidence provided by masked priming results has emerged. This book contains thirteen original chapters in which these three components of visual word processing are examined using the masked priming procedure. The chapters showcase the advantages of masked priming as an alternative to more standard methods of studying language processing that require comparisons of matched items. Based on a recent conference, this book offers up-to-date research findings, and would be valuable to researchers and students of word recognition, psycholinguistics, or reading.

Fundamental to this book is an attempt to understand the nature of individual differences in word and nonword reading by connecting three literatures that have developed largely in isolation from one another: the literatures on acquired dyslexia, difficulties in learning to read, and precocious reading.

People with psychiatric and neurological illness sometimes say and think the most amazing things. They might believe they are dead; claim to see, despite being blind; or "remember" things that never happened. Historical demarcations between academic disciplines dictate that these are distinct clinical phenomena – ‘delusion’, ‘anosognosia’ (the delusional denial of illness on some accounts) or ‘confabulation’. This Special Issue brings together leading researchers from diverse fields – memory researchers, clinical neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, cognitive scientists and philosophers – to consider the extent to which these different phenomena overlap. Opinions differ. Some researchers use the term confabulation very generally to refer to false claims whether these concern belief or memory. Other researchers advocate an exclusive approach, according to which no symptom could ever qualify as both delusional and confabulatory. Yet others focus on points of similarity and argue that historical discord between psychodynamic and cognitive neuroscientific approaches has obscured similarities with regard the roles of emotion and motivation. Some contributors highlight both difference and similarity; they consider points of overlap – the instances of confabulation which qualify as delusional – or advocate a common monitoring framework to explain all distortions of reality. Despite their differing views, our contributors all share the common aims of clarifying theoretical conceptions, evaluating similarities and differences, and learning more about underlying causal mechanisms so as to advance the cognitive neuropsychiatry of both delusion and confabulation.

Covering a range of topics, from the evolution of language, theory of mind, and the mentality of apes, through to psychological disorders, human mating strategies and relationship processes, this volume makes a timely and significant contribution to what is fast becoming one of the most prominent and fruitful approaches to understanding the nature and psychology of the human mind.

Speech Production: Models, Phonetic Processes andTechniques brings together researchers from many different disciplines - computer science, dentistry, engineering, linguistics, phonetics, physiology, psychology - all with a special interest in how speech is produced. From the initial neural program to the end acoustic signal, it provides an overview of several dominant models in the speech production literature, as well as up-to-date accounts of persistent theoretical issues in the area. A particular focus is on the evaluation of information gleaned from instrumental investigations of the speech production process, including MRI, PET, ultra-sound, video-imaging, EMA, EPG, X-ray, computer simulation - and many others. The research presented in this volume considers questions such as: the feed-back vs. feed-forward control of speech; the acoustic/auditory vs. articulatory/somato-sensory domains of speech planning; the innateness of human speech; the possible architecture of a speech production model; and the realization of prosodic structure in speech. Leaders in speech research from around the world have contributed their most recent work to this volume.

This indispensable textbook provides the underpinning knowledge to support all teaching assistants working towards Level 2 of the National Occupational Standards. This new edition is fully revised and extended to incorporate and respond to all new materials required to meet the 2007 standards. Taking into account current initiatives including Workforce Remodelling and the Every Child Matters agenda, the book can be used to support NVQs, or other Teaching Assistant awards at level 2, or can be used simply to supplement good practice.This accessible companion: actively engages the reader in activities, developing reflective practice while giving the theoretical background to school-based workgives insight and information about pupils’ individual needshelps teaching assistants develop curriculum-based skills to enable more effective classroom supportemphasises that teaching assistants are team members, supporting the school and being supported by the school. Contributions from specialist advisers ensure that the ideas and techniques are up to date, relevant and the best practice. All phases of education are covered, from the early years to later secondary years, and references are made to sources of further information throughout the book.The Essential Guide for Competent Teaching Assistants is invaluable in supporting both study and everyday practice. It will also be useful to training providers, teachers and school managers supporting Teaching Assistants in their professional development.

Cognitive neuropsychological research studies of people with cognitive deficits have typically been directed either at investigating methods of intervention, or at furthering our understanding of normal and impaired cognition. This book reports on research that combines these goals, using studies that use intervention as a ‘tool’ for investigating hypotheses about the functioning of the human cognitive system. The introductory chapter discusses some of the unique and more general difficulties that this approach faces, while the five reports describe intervention studies with children and adults with cognitive impairments – studies which investigate current theories of cognition. The studies demonstrate that the use of intervention to study cognition is a promising and valuable methodology. Aiming to promote wider use of these combined methods, this book makes it clear that while the approach faces various methodological and interpretative challenges, it has the advantage of providing advances on issues of theory while, at the same time providing treatment to participants, and bringing together what have been largely separate research traditions. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology.

This collection of essays focuses on the interface between delusions and self-deception. As pathologies of belief, delusions and self-deception raise many of the same challenges for those seeking to understand them. Are delusions and self-deception entirely distinct phenomena, or might some forms of self-deception also qualify as delusional? To what extent might models of self-deception and delusion share common factors? In what ways do affect and motivation enter into normal belief-formation, and how might they be implicated in self-deception and delusion? The essays in this volume tackle these questions from both empirical and conceptual perspectives. Some contributors focus on the general question of how to locate self-deception and delusion within our taxonomy of psychological states. Some contributors ask whether particular delusions - such as the Capgras delusion or anosognosia for hemiplegia - might be explained by appeal to motivational and affective factors. And some contributors provide general models of motivated reasoning, against which theories of pathological belief-formation might be measured.The volume will be of interest to cognitive scientists, clinicians, and philosophers interested in the nature of belief and the disturbances to which it is subject.

This volume focuses on the remediation of impairments of word production in aphasia. It is restricted to studies focusing on single word production and comprises papers by some of the researchers most active in this field worldwide. The scope of the papers is broad and includes many relatively under-researched areas and techniques. All the papers have in common a methodological rigour and the use of a single case or case-series approach. A range of treatment tasks are evaluated: 'phonological' tasks such as phonological cueing and word repetition, and judgements regarding the phonological form; 'orthographic' tasks such as orthographic cueing, word reading and writing to dictation; 'semantic' tasks such as semantic cueing; the use of gesture; computer presentation of tasks and even just repeated attempts at naming. In addition, the individuals treated using these techniques varied in the nature of their impairments and/or level of impairment that was targeted. The majority aimed to improve word retrieval generally, but one treatment was aimed specifically at verb retrieval, and another at improving accuracy of word production for an individual with a phonological encoding impairment. Each paper relates the outcome of treatment to theoretical accounts of impairment, and one explicitly uses the results of therapy to inform these theories. Taken together these papers provide a snapshot of the 'state of the art' in the rehabilitation of word production in aphasia.

The journal Cognitive Neuropsychology began publication in 1984. In 2004 a special symposium was held at the annual European Workshop on Cognitive Neuropsychology at Bressanone to take stock of the developments in cognitive neuropsychology represented by the first twenty volumes of the journal, and this book is the result. In the book, prominent cognitive neuropsychologists provide state-of-the-art overviews of what cognitive neuropsychology has told us about the normal mechanisms of conceptual representation, spoken word production, the comprehension and construction of sentences, reading, spelling, memory, visual attention visual object recognition, and everyday action and planning. Key topics that are covered include computational cognitive neuropsychology, the relationship of cognitive neuropsychology to cognitive neuroscience, modularity, and the current status of such traditional features of cognitive neuropsychology as the rejection of group studies in favour of single case studies and the rejection of the study of syndromes in favour of the study of symptoms.

In the late-1980s, visual cognition was a small subfield of cognitive psychology, and the standard texts mainly discussed just iconic memory in their sections on visual cognition. In the subsequent two decades, and especially very recently, many remarkable new aspects of the processing of brief visual stimuli have been discovered -- change blindness, repetition blindness, the attentional blink, newly-discovered properties of visual short-term memory and of the face recognition system, the influence of reentrant processing on visual perception, and the surprisingly intimate relationships between eyeblinks and visual cognition. This volume provides up-to-date tutorial reviews of these many new developments in the study of visual cognition written by the leaders in the discipline, providing an incisive and comprehensive survey of research in this dynamic field.

Fundamental to this book is an attempt to understand the nature of individual differences in word and nonword reading by connecting three literatures that have developed largely in isolation from one another: the literatures on acquired dyslexia, difficulties in learning to read, and precocious reading.

Masked priming has a short and somewhat controversial history. When used as a tool to study whether semantic processing can occur in the absence of conscious awareness, considerable debate followed, mainly about whether masked priming truly tapped unconscious processes. For research into other components of visual word processing, however - in particular, orthographic, phonological, and morphological - a general consensus about the evidence provided by masked priming results has emerged. This book contains thirteen original chapters in which these three components of visual word processing are examined using the masked priming procedure. The chapters showcase the advantages of masked priming as an alternative to more standard methods of studying language processing that require comparisons of matched items. Based on a recent conference, this book offers up-to-date research findings, and would be valuable to researchers and students of word recognition, psycholinguistics, or reading.

Speech Production: Models, Phonetic Processes andTechniques brings together researchers from many different disciplines - computer science, dentistry, engineering, linguistics, phonetics, physiology, psychology - all with a special interest in how speech is produced. From the initial neural program to the end acoustic signal, it provides an overview of several dominant models in the speech production literature, as well as up-to-date accounts of persistent theoretical issues in the area. A particular focus is on the evaluation of information gleaned from instrumental investigations of the speech production process, including MRI, PET, ultra-sound, video-imaging, EMA, EPG, X-ray, computer simulation - and many others. The research presented in this volume considers questions such as: the feed-back vs. feed-forward control of speech; the acoustic/auditory vs. articulatory/somato-sensory domains of speech planning; the innateness of human speech; the possible architecture of a speech production model; and the realization of prosodic structure in speech. Leaders in speech research from around the world have contributed their most recent work to this volume.

This collection of essays focuses on the interface between delusions and self-deception. As pathologies of belief, delusions and self-deception raise many of the same challenges for those seeking to understand them. Are delusions and self-deception entirely distinct phenomena, or might some forms of self-deception also qualify as delusional? To what extent might models of self-deception and delusion share common factors? In what ways do affect and motivation enter into normal belief-formation, and how might they be implicated in self-deception and delusion? The essays in this volume tackle these questions from both empirical and conceptual perspectives. Some contributors focus on the general question of how to locate self-deception and delusion within our taxonomy of psychological states. Some contributors ask whether particular delusions - such as the Capgras delusion or anosognosia for hemiplegia - might be explained by appeal to motivational and affective factors. And some contributors provide general models of motivated reasoning, against which theories of pathological belief-formation might be measured.The volume will be of interest to cognitive scientists, clinicians, and philosophers interested in the nature of belief and the disturbances to which it is subject.

This volume focuses on the remediation of impairments of word production in aphasia. It is restricted to studies focusing on single word production and comprises papers by some of the researchers most active in this field worldwide. The scope of the papers is broad and includes many relatively under-researched areas and techniques. All the papers have in common a methodological rigour and the use of a single case or case-series approach. A range of treatment tasks are evaluated: 'phonological' tasks such as phonological cueing and word repetition, and judgements regarding the phonological form; 'orthographic' tasks such as orthographic cueing, word reading and writing to dictation; 'semantic' tasks such as semantic cueing; the use of gesture; computer presentation of tasks and even just repeated attempts at naming. In addition, the individuals treated using these techniques varied in the nature of their impairments and/or level of impairment that was targeted. The majority aimed to improve word retrieval generally, but one treatment was aimed specifically at verb retrieval, and another at improving accuracy of word production for an individual with a phonological encoding impairment. Each paper relates the outcome of treatment to theoretical accounts of impairment, and one explicitly uses the results of therapy to inform these theories. Taken together these papers provide a snapshot of the 'state of the art' in the rehabilitation of word production in aphasia.

The journal Cognitive Neuropsychology began publication in 1984. In 2004 a special symposium was held at the annual European Workshop on Cognitive Neuropsychology at Bressanone to take stock of the developments in cognitive neuropsychology represented by the first twenty volumes of the journal, and this book is the result. In the book, prominent cognitive neuropsychologists provide state-of-the-art overviews of what cognitive neuropsychology has told us about the normal mechanisms of conceptual representation, spoken word production, the comprehension and construction of sentences, reading, spelling, memory, visual attention visual object recognition, and everyday action and planning. Key topics that are covered include computational cognitive neuropsychology, the relationship of cognitive neuropsychology to cognitive neuroscience, modularity, and the current status of such traditional features of cognitive neuropsychology as the rejection of group studies in favour of single case studies and the rejection of the study of syndromes in favour of the study of symptoms.

Progressive language impairments comprise a broad range of symptoms of impaired language processing that worsen over time as a result of neurodegenerative disease, and that range from impaired knowledge of the concepts underlying language through reading and writing difficulties to impaired ability to articulate speech. This volume focuses on intervention for progressive language impairments, providing an overview of current research and including examples of interventions at different levels (e.g., impairment-directed interventions, activity/participation-directed interventions). The aim of this volume is to demonstrate the potential for intervention in these disorders and to overcome any remaining prejudice that intervention is not appropriate for individuals with progressive language impairments.

People with psychiatric and neurological illness sometimes say and think the most amazing things. They might believe they are dead; claim to see, despite being blind; or "remember" things that never happened. Historical demarcations between academic disciplines dictate that these are distinct clinical phenomena – ‘delusion’, ‘anosognosia’ (the delusional denial of illness on some accounts) or ‘confabulation’. This Special Issue brings together leading researchers from diverse fields – memory researchers, clinical neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, cognitive scientists and philosophers – to consider the extent to which these different phenomena overlap. Opinions differ. Some researchers use the term confabulation very generally to refer to false claims whether these concern belief or memory. Other researchers advocate an exclusive approach, according to which no symptom could ever qualify as both delusional and confabulatory. Yet others focus on points of similarity and argue that historical discord between psychodynamic and cognitive neuroscientific approaches has obscured similarities with regard the roles of emotion and motivation. Some contributors highlight both difference and similarity; they consider points of overlap – the instances of confabulation which qualify as delusional – or advocate a common monitoring framework to explain all distortions of reality. Despite their differing views, our contributors all share the common aims of clarifying theoretical conceptions, evaluating similarities and differences, and learning more about underlying causal mechanisms so as to advance the cognitive neuropsychiatry of both delusion and confabulation.

In the late-1980s, visual cognition was a small subfield of cognitive psychology, and the standard texts mainly discussed just iconic memory in their sections on visual cognition. In the subsequent two decades, and especially very recently, many remarkable new aspects of the processing of brief visual stimuli have been discovered -- change blindness, repetition blindness, the attentional blink, newly-discovered properties of visual short-term memory and of the face recognition system, the influence of reentrant processing on visual perception, and the surprisingly intimate relationships between eyeblinks and visual cognition. This volume provides up-to-date tutorial reviews of these many new developments in the study of visual cognition written by the leaders in the discipline, providing an incisive and comprehensive survey of research in this dynamic field.