Oxford Psychology Series – serie

Memory is typically thought of as a set of neural representations - 'memory traces' - that must be found and reactivated in order to be experienced. It is often suggested that 'memory traces' are represented by a hierarchically organized system of analyzers, modified, sharpened and differentiated by encounters with successive events. Remembering: An activity of mind and brain is the magnum opus of one of the leading figures in the psychology of memory. It sets out Fergus Craik's current view of human memory as a dynamic activity of mind and brain. The author argues that remembering should be understood as a system of active cognitive processes, similar to (perhaps identical to) the processes underlying attending, perceiving and thinking. Thus, encoding processes are essentially viewed as the mental activities involved in perceiving and understanding, and retrieval is described as the partial reactivation of these same processes. This account proposes that episodic and semantic memory should be thought of as levels in a continuum of specificity rather than as separate systems of memory. In addition, the book presents Craik's views on working memory and on age-related memory impairments. In the latter case the losses are attributed largely to a difficulty with the self-initiation of appropriate encoding and retrieval operations compensated, when needed, by support from the external environment. The development of these ideas is discussed throughout the book and illustrated substantially by experiments from the author's lab, but also by empirical and theoretical contributions from other researchers. A broad account of current ideas and findings in contemporary memory research, but viewed from the author's personal theoretical standpoint, Remembering: An activity of mind and brain will be essential for researchers, graduate and postdoctoral students working in the field of human memory.

Response times are a fascinating source of information on how the mind is organized - the time taken to carry out an action tells us something about the choice process involved. This is a critical but even-handed treatment of the major themes of how response times play a role in our thinking about the mind. Professor Luce provides a comprehensive, clear review of the experimental data, and puts forward the idea of the hazard function - a novel and important approach that he and his colleagues have developed. This function, based on the probability that an reaction is about to occur given that no reaction has occurred so far during a trial, exaggerates the differences that normal analysis methods often obscure. This enables the researcher to rule out more confidently known mechanisms of time delay in human performance.Since measurements of response times are widely used by experimental psychologists as one approach to distinguishing between theories of intellectual functioning, the conceptual arguments that Professor Luce brings to bear on mathematical models of response time are of great relevance to mathematical and experimental psychologists.

This book reviews recent research on the ability of human listeners to discern changes in the shape of complex acoustic spectra--what is known as auditory profile analysis. It also discusses in a systematic way issues surrounding the discrimination of a change in acoustic intensity and the physiological mechanisms responsible for these discrimination processes. The author concludes with two new theories that provide a way of understanding more complex auditory skills, such as those involved in listening to music and speech. This book will be of interest to psychoacousticians, psychophysicists, physiological psychologists, and experimental psychologists.

This book looks at lower level visual processing, emphasizing psychophysical experiments which measure the detection and identification of near-threshold patterns and the mathematical models used to draw inferences from experimental results. Neurophysiological and psychophysical evidence is compared and contrasted, while introductory material on psychophysical methods, signal detection theory, and the mathematics of Fourier analysis ensure that the title is accessible to anyone interested in this field. Also included are lists of studies about analysers and parametric sensitivity on various pattern-vision dimensions.

Based upon two decades of research with patients who have experienced pathology in one hemisphere of the brain, this book deals with brain mechanisms in human communicative behaviour, and with related motor functions from a broadly biological point of view. The work discusses the possible evolutionary origins of human communication, the relation of brain mechanisms in communicative behaviour to analogous nonhuman behaviors, and the neural systems involved in various levels and kinds of communication. Noncommunicative mechanisms which parallel those used in communication are also outlined in detail. Individual differences in brain organization for some functions are also explored. Much new data is presented along with the theoretical treatment of human communication which emphasizes a behavioral rather than a linguistic approach. The work will interest psycholinguists, cognitive psychologists, neurologists, clinical neuropsychologists, speech pathologists, and advanced students in these fields.

This book presents a clear, coherent account of spatial vision, integrating anatomical, perceptual, psychophysical, and neurophysiological data collected by both the authors and other researchers.

This work presents a systematic analysis of the psychological phenomena associated with the concept of mental representations--also referred to as cognitive or internal representations. A major restatement of a theory the author first developed in his 1971 book (Imagery and Verbal Processes), Mental Representation covers phenomena from the earlier period that remain relevant today but emphasizes cognitive problems and paradigms that have since emerged more fully. The author proposes that performance in memory and other cognitive tasks is mediated not only by linguistic processes but also by a distinct nonverbal imagery model of thought as well. He discusses the philosophy of science associated with the dual coding approach, emphasizing the advantages of empiricism in the study of cognitive phenomena and showing that the fundamentals of the theory have stood up well to empirical challenges over the years. An important contribution to the understanding of form and function of human knowledge, this book will be of interest to students and researchers in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy.

Written by a distinguished experimental psychologist, this authoritative volume provides a clear, well-balanced, and comprehensive treatment of the mathematical theory of human response time and the role it plays in our understanding of the mind's structure. Focusing on the conceptual issues entailed in the modelling of response time, Professor Luce rigorously reviews the relevant experimental data and discusses the importance of analyzing data in terms of the hazard function.

Based on the well-known Fitts Lectures, this volume presents a core set of concepts and principles that propose a unified interpretation of memory categorization, and decision making.

Implicit knowledge, a term coined by Reber in 1965, is acquired independent of conscious attempts to learn, and generally without the capacity to communicate what has been acquired. One of the core assumptions of this argument is that implicit learning is a fundamental process, one that lies at the very heart of the adaptive behavioural repertoire of every complex organism. This is a highly readable account of the cognitive unconscious, focusing in particular on the problem of implicit learning.

Understanding classification is a major challenge for formulating theories of both human cognition and artificial intelligence. Classification is a human mental activity which covers such diverse things as forming concepts, categorizing medical patients, recognising an acquaintance, or discriminating phonetic components of a language. This book considers both previous theories and new research and comes up with a new core model which it proposes as the basis of all forms of classification. Two versions of this model are developed, one based on symbol-processing, and one on connectionist architecture, and it is suggested that modules of each type of model coexist in the human cognitive system, competing for control of behavioural output.

This book examines how people understand utterances that are intended figuratively. Traditionally, figurative language such as metaphors and idioms has been considered derivative from more complex than ostensibly straightforward literal language. Glucksberg argues that figurative language involves the same kinds of linguistic and pragmatic operations that are used for ordinary, literal language. Glucksberg's research in this book is concerned with ordinary language: expressions that are used in daily life, including conversations about everyday matters, newspaper and magazine articles, and the media. Metaphor is the major focus of the book. Idioms, however, are also treated comprehensively, as is the theory of conceptual metaphor in the context of how people understand both conventional and novel figurative expressions. A new theory of metaphor comprehension is put forward, and evaluated with respect to competing theories in linguistics and in psychology. The central tenet of the theory is that ordinary conversational metaphors are used to create new concepts and categories. This process is spontaneous and automatic. Metaphor is special only in the sense that these catagories get their names from the best examples of the things they represent, and that these categories get their names from the best examples of those categories. Thus, the literal "shark" can be a metaphor for any vicious and predatory being, from unscrupulous salespeople to a murderous character in The Threepenny Opera. Because the same term, e.g.,"shark," is used both for its literal referent and for the metaphorical category, as in "My lawyer is a shark," we call it the dual-reference theory. The theory is then extended to two other domains: idioms and conceptual metaphors. The book presents the first comprehensive account of how people use and understand metaphors in everyday life.

This book brings together and assesses past and present research on information processing, and formulates a new general model of this entire system. Throughout his discussion, Cowan emphasizes that memory and attention cannot be considered independently and presents new research in psychophysiology, visual perception, cognitive development, and individual differences to support his thesis. This book offers both a review of the literature and a new model, and it will appeal to both the student and the professional interested in memory, attention, and cognitive psychology.

This book presents the basic concepts of classical psychophysics, derived from Gustav Fechner, as seen from the perspective of modern measurement theory. The theoretical discussion is elucidated with examples and numerous problems, and solutions to one-quarter of the problems are provided in the text.

The visual system must extract from the light that falls on the retina meaningful information about what is where in our environment. At an early stage it analyzes the incoming sensory data along many dimensions of pattern vision, e.g. spatial frequency, orientation, velocity, eye-of-origin. Visual Pattern Analyzers provides a definitive account of current knowledge about this stage of visual processing. Nowhere else can such a comprehensive summarty of the lower level pattern analyzers be found. The book's emphasis is on psychophysical experiments measuiring the detection and identification of near-threshold patterns -- and the mathematical models, such as multidimensional signal-detection theory, used to draw inferences from such experimental results -- but neurophysiological evidence is presented and compared critically to the psychophysical evidence. Introductory material on psychophysical methods, signal detection theory, and the mathematics of Fourier analysis is gioven in order to make the book more accessible to all who are interested in the lower or higher levels of visual perception. This volume will be of great value to researchers and graduate students in the fields of vision and perception. Within the scientific community there is wide interest in the visual system, and the book will be of use to investigators in many fields, including psychophysics, neuroscience, ophthalmology and optics, computer science, and cognitive and experimental psychology.

This book addresses the central problem of music cognition: how listeners' responses move beyond mere registration of auditory events to include the organization, interpretation, and remembrance of these events in terms of their function in a musical context of pitch and rhythm. Equally important, the work offers an analysis of the relationship between the psychological organization of music and its internal structure. Combining over a decade of original research on music cognition with an overview of the available literature, the work will be of interest to cognitive and physiological psychologists, psychobiologists, musicians, music researchers, and music educators. The author provides the necessary background in experimental methodology and music theory so that no specialized knowledge is required for following her major arguments.

A decade or so of intensive research on false memory has revealed much that is not well understood outside the circles of scientists who specialize in such research. However, this research has produced findings that have major implications for a number of fields that are central to human welfare, such as medicine and the law. This book has been written to make those findings accessible to a much wider audience than research specialists including child protective services workers, clinical psychologists, defense attorneys, elementary and secondary teachers, general medical practitioners, journalists, judges, nurses, police investigators, prosecutors, and psychiatrists. For that reason, the book assumes little or no background knowledge in the techniques of memory research. The volume begins with a consideration of progenitors of the modern science of false memory and notes the remarkable degree to which core themes of contemporary research were anticipated by historical figures such as Binet, Piaget, and Bartlett. It continues with an account of the varied methods that have been used to study false science of false memory, with the coverage revolving around three topics: theoretical ideas, both old and new, that have been used to explain false memory and to make predictions about it; research findings and predictions about age changes in false memory between early processes conceptions of false memory, is stressed. In Part II, attention shifts to the falsifiability of eyewitness identifications of suspects; false-memory reports in abuse crimes; and false memory in psychotherapy, including recovered memories of previous lives. Although Part II is concerned with applied research, we again emphasize the unifying trends are explored, with attention being focused on three expanding areas of false-memory research: mathematical models, aging effects, and cognitive neuroscience.

How much can we learn about normal visual perception and cognition from a malfunctioning visual system? Quite a lot, as Michael McCloskey makes abundantly clear in this book. McCloskey presents his work with AH, a college student who has an extraordinary deficit in visual perception. When AH looks at an object, she sees it clearly and identifies it readily; yet she is often dramatically mistaken about where the object is or how it is oriented. For example, she may reach out to grasp an object that she sees on her left, but miss it completely because it is actually on her right; or she may see an arrow pointing up when it is really pointing down. AH's errors, together with many other clues, lead McCloskey to some very interesting conclusions about how we perceive the world. He develops theoretical claims about visual subsystems, the nature of visual location and orientation representations, attention and spatial representations, the role of the visual system in mental imagery, and the levels of the visual system implicated in awareness. Visual Reflections makes a fascinating and compelling case that we can often learn more about a process when it goes awry than when it functions flawlessly.

This cutting-edge book offers a theoretical account of the evolution of multiple memory systems of the brain. The authors conceptualize these memory systems from both behavioural and neurobiological perspectives, guided by three related principles. First, that our understanding of a wide range of memory phenomena can be advanced by breaking down memory into multiple forms with different operating characteristics. Second, that different forms of memory representation are supported by distinct brain pathways with circuitry and neural coding properties. Third, that the contributions of different brain systems can be compared and contrasted by distinguishing between dedicated (or specific) and elaborate (or general) memory systems. A primary goal of this work is to relate the neurobiological properties of dedicated and elaborate systems to their neuropsychological counterparts, and in so doing, account for the phenomenology of memory, from conditioning to conscious recollection.

Mental imagery has always been a controversial topic in psychology. The major problem has been the inherently private nature of mental images, which has traditionally prevented objective assessment of their structure and function. Between researchers in cognitive psychology and computer-science, a debate, now commonly called 'the imagery debate' arose about what exactly constitutes a mental image. Although the imagery researchers in cognitive psychology assumed that mental images were in fact images, and hence often compared them to pictures, the computer-science researchers relied on language-like internal representations that are easy to implement in programming languages. On the side of the computer-science researchers, Zenon Pylyshyn has argued that the picture metaphor underlying theoretical discussions of visual mental imagery is seriously misleading, particularly because it suggests that an image is an entity to be perceived. Pylyshyn has claimed that to describe what we know adequately, we must posit mental structures that describe, that are conceptual and propositional in nature, rather than sensory or pictorial-symbolic descriptions, rather than images. On the side of the mental-imagery researchers, Stephen Kosslyn has argued that the idea that mental depict, as opposed to describe, is not only defensible, but most consistent with the emerging body of data about imagery. In this volume, Stephen Kosslyn revisits the debate some 30 years later, when it has evolved to bear on a much more general concern: the relation between mental phenomena and underlying natural substrates. Kosslyn summarises the arguments and positions, puts them in context, and shows how modern neuroscientific methods can illustrate the representational nature of mental imagery.

Most people are surprised to learn that seeing has not yet been explained by science. Incredibly, scientists cannot even explain why some surfaces appear to be black while others appear to be white. The physical difference between a surface that appears to be black and one that appears to be white results from the percentage ot light that the object reflects, known as reflectance. A white surface reflects 30 times more light into the eye than a black surface. The amount of light reflected by a surface into the eye is, however, a product of more than its own reflectance; it is also a product of the intensity of illumination it receives. A sheet of white paper lying within a shadow can easily reflect the same absolute amount of light as a sheet of black paper lying outside the shadow. Thus, there is essentially no correlation between the amount of light reflected by a suface and its physical shade: a black paper in a bright light and a white paper in shadow reflect identical light to the eye. Still, the black paper appears to be black and the white paper appears to be white. How can it be? Somehow the visual system must use the surrounding context. But how? Good thinkers have struggled with this problem for over a thousand years, and the last 150 years have witnessed a sustained assault on the problem. In this volume, Alan Gilchrist, one of the leading researchers in achromatic perception, reviews the history of the scientific development of lightness theory from the nineteenth century until the present and outlines and critiques all the main theories of lightness, laying out the strengths and weaknesses of each. Based on thirty years of research, Gilchrist presents his own argument that previous models of lightness perception are too good because they fail to capture the errors and illusions present in human perception. These errors may contain crucial clues in the sense that the overall pattern of errors is the signature of the human visual system.

The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade now. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream approach. However, the dynamical-systems perspective on mental activity is now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing it to move beyond the trendy buzzwords that have become associated with it. The Continuity of Mind will help to galvanize the forces of dynamical systems theory, cognitive and computational neuroscience, connectionism, and ecological psychology that are needed to complete this paradigm shift. In this book, Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the day's events involves the coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns over time, i.e., a continuous state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result, the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time, the state space (in which brief visitations of attractor basins are your 'thoughts') suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions, but extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a result, your moment-by-moment experience of the world around you, even right now, can be described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that comprises diverse mental states. Spivey has organized The Continuity of Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. As a result, the apparent partitions that were once thought to separate mental constructs inevitably turn out, upon closer inspection, to be fuzzy graded transitions. The initial chapters provide first-hand demonstrations of the 'gray areas' in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. The final chapters discuss what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space. The Continuity of Mind is essential reading for those in the cognitive and neural sciences who want to see where the Dynamical Cognition movement is taking us.

In recent years the field of cognitive aging has flourished and expanded into many different disciplines. It is probably, therefore, inevitable that some of the research has become very narrow, primarily focused on "counting and classifying the wrinkles of aged behavior," rather than addressing more broad, general, and important questions. Timothy Salthouse's main goal in this book is to try to identify some of the major phenomena in the field of cognitive aging, and discuss issues relevant to the investigation and interpretation of them. He does not attempt to provide a comprehensive survey of the research literature on aging and cognition because many excellent reviews are available in edited handbooks. His principal aim is rather to stimulate readers to think about the big questions in cognitive aging research, and how they might best be answered.

"This volume is the most important if not the final word on the great imagery debate. It examines issues critical to all cognition. For example, whether the brain is a general purpose computer and if the brain's structure imposes limits on what can be represented in our minds." Michael I. Posner, Prof. Emeritus University of Oregon |k No"The Case for Mental Imagery is destined to be a classic text in psychology. [the authors] present an in-depth, philosophically sophisticated, and empirically supported argument that clarifies and settles many of the most contentious issues in the longstanding, decades-long 'imagery debate'...This is an impressive achievement and an outstanding example of the way controversies can be addressed through a combination of sophisticated theoretical concepts paired with expertly conducted scientific research programs."--PsycCRITIQUES |k No"This is an outstanding book that presents a roadmap of the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying mental imagery. The field of mental imagery has a long and somewhat dark history and the study of the critical cognitive ability has only been considered scientifically legitimate relatively recently. In this book, Kosslyn and colleagues not only summarize the wealth of their own recent scientific findings but elegantly place these findings and their theoretical perspective in the larger historical and contemporary context of studies on mental imagery. The book distills a rich, complicated domain into a series of accessible topics and will serve as an invaluable guide to those entering the field, a refresher for those with passing knowledge, and a major reference for the cognoscenti."--Marlene Behrmann, Professor of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University"For centuries, mental imagery has been recognized as one of the keys to understanding human intelligence, emotion, and creativity. Stephen Kosslyn developed the first comprehensive theory of this faculty of mind, and for three decades has explored it with theoretical depth, experimental ingenuity, and a relentless drive to get to the bottom of puzzles and controversies. Kosslyn has now given us a magisterial account of this crucial aspect of mental life. A seamless synthesis of mind and brain, The Case for Mental Imagery is a case of cognitive neuroscience at its finest."--Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University"The definitive treatment of mental imagery from a pictorialist point of view."--Ned Block, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, New York University

Elements of Episodic Memory was a seminal text in the memory literature, highly cited and influential. It has been unavailable for some years, but is now back in print as in its original form, with this reissue.The book examines the critical role that retrieval processes play in remembering. It proposes that the nature of recollective experience is determined by the interaction between the 'episodic' trace information and the 'semantic' retrieval information. This basic theme is elaborated by tracing the development of the ideas considering relevant empirical evidence, relating a proposed theoretical framework to the ideas held by other theorists, and dealing with criticisms advanced by others.These issues are discussed from two perspectives. Firstly, from the point of view of 'detached science': the emphasis here is on ideas, hypotheses, evidence, logic and theory. The second is a personal commentary on the development of ideas at the first viewpoint, and provides observations about the psychology and sociology of a developing science.

What are the mental processes involved in listening to, performing, and composing music? What is involved in 'understanding' a piece of music? How are such skills acquired?Questions such as these form the basis of the cognitive psychology of music. The author addresses these questions by surveying the growing experimental literature on the subject. The topics covered will be of interest to psychologists, as windows onto a human cognitive skill of some complexity that is only now beginning to receive the attention devoted to such skills as language. They are also relevant to musicians who are seeking to understand the psychological bases of their skills.The author does not simply review existing research, but takes a critical look at what has been achieved in the subject, introducing such topics as composition and musical skill in non-literate cultures. He draws freely on his own knowledge and experience as a practising musician, as well as a psychologist, to provide an overview that is scholarly and also accessible to the general reader.

The last 50 years have witnessed a rapid growth in the understanding of the articulation and the acoustics of vowels. Contemporary theories of speech perception have concentrated on consonant perception, and this volume is intended as a balance to such bias. The authors propose a computational theory of auditory vowel perception, accounting for vowel identification in the face of acoustic differences between speakers and speaking rate and stress. This work lays the foundation for future experimental and computational studies of vowel perception.

Ranging from behavioral to molecular levels of analysis, this informative study presents the results of recent research into the biochemistry and neural mechanisms of imprinting. Horn discusses some of the difficulties that researchers have encountered in analyzing the neural basis of memory and describes ways in which these difficulties have been overcome through the analysis of memories underlying habituation and imprinting. He also considers the biochemical consequences of imprinting and its cerebral localization, and examines the relationships between human and animal memory.

This book provides the first general and unified theory of visual discomfort. The theory is based on the observation that people find certain visual stimuli uncomfortable, and that these same stimule induce seizures in patients with photosensitive epilepsy. The theory is applied to a variety of everyday problems such as eye strain from reading, lighting, television and VDU terminals, and more generally from design. A variety of techniques for preventing and treating visual discomfort are described.