Browse

The emerging field of action science is characterized by a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches which share the basic functional belief that evolution has optimized cognitive systems to serve the demands of action. This book brings together the constitutive approaches of action science in a single source, covering the relationship of action to such cognitive functions as perception, attention, memory, and volition. Each chapter, written by a different scientist in the field, offers a tutorial-like description of a major line of inquiry. Considered as one unit, the chapters reflect a rapidly growing field, and provide a forum for comparison and possible integration of approaches. After discussing core questions about how actions are controlled and learned, the book considers ecological approaches to action science; neurocognitive approaches to action understanding and attention; developmental approaches to action science; social actions, including imitation and joint action; and the relationships between action and the conceptual system (grounded cognition) and between volition and action.

This book examines the neural underpinnings of decision-making using “bias” as its core concept, rather than the more common but noncommittal terms “selection” and “attention.” It offers an integrative, interdisciplinary account of the structure and function of bias, which it defines as a basic brain mechanism that attaches different weights to different information sources, prioritizing some cognitive representations at the expense of others. The author introduces the concepts of bias and sensitivity based on notions from Bayesian probability, which he translates into easily recognizable neural signatures, introduced by concrete examples from the experimental literature. He examines, among other topics, positive and negative motivations for giving priority to different sensory inputs, and looks for the neural underpinnings of racism, sexism, and other forms of “familiarity bias.” The author—a poet and essayist as well as a scientist—connects findings and ideas in neuroscience to analogous concepts in such diverse fields as post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, literary theory, philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology, and experimental economics.

Do animals have cognitive maps? Do they possess knowledge? Do they plan for the future? Do they understand that others have mental lives of their own? This volume provides a state-of-the-art assessment of animal cognition, with experts from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, ecology, and evolutionary biology addressing these questions in an integrative fashion. It summarizes the latest research, identifies areas where consensus has been reached, and takes on current controversies. Over the last thirty years, the field has shifted from the collection of anecdotes and the pursuit of the subjective experience of animals to a rigorous, hypothesis-driven experimental approach. Taking a skeptical stance, this volume stresses the notion that in many cases relatively simple rules may account for rather complex and flexible behaviors. The book critically evaluates current concepts and puts a strong focus on the psychological mechanisms that underpin animal behavior. It offers comparative analyses that reveal common principles as well as adaptations that evolved in particular species in response to specific selective pressures. It assesses experimental approaches to the study of animal navigation, decision making, social cognition, and communication and suggests directions for future research. The book promotes a research program that seeks to understand animals’ cognitive abilities and behavioral routines as individuals and as members of social groups.

Contrary to popular opinion, one of the main problems in providing uniformly excellent health care is not lack of money but lack of knowledge—on the part of both doctors and patients. The studies in this book show that many doctors and most patients do not understand the available medical evidence. Both patients and doctors are “risk illiterate”—frequently unable to tell the difference between actual risk and relative risk. Further, unwarranted disparity in treatment decisions is the rule rather than the exception in the United States and Europe. All of this contributes to much wasted spending in health care. The contributors investigate the roots of the problem, from the emphasis in medical research on technology and blockbuster drugs to the lack of education for both doctors and patients. They call for a new, more enlightened health care, with better medical education, journals that report study outcomes completely and transparently, and patients in control of their personal medical records, not afraid of statistics but able to use them to make informed decisions about their treatments.

Conscious control enables human decision makers to override routines, to exercise willpower, to find innovative solutions, to learn by instruction, to decide collectively, and to justify their choices. These and many more advantages come, however, at a price. The ability to process information consciously is severely limited. Conscious decision makers are liable to hundreds of biases, yet measured against the norms of rational choice theory, they perform poorly. If they forego conscious control, in appropriate tasks, humans perform surprisingly better. This inaugural Strüngmann Forum Report explores the human ability to make decisions: consciously as well as without conscious control; deliberate and intuitive; explicit and implicit; processing information serially and in parallel; with a general-purpose apparatus or with task-specific neural subsystems. The analysis taken is at four levels—neural, psychological, evolutionary, and institutional—and discussion is extended to the definition of social problems and the design of better institutional interventions. The results presented differ greatly from what one expects under standard rational choice theory and deviate even more from the alternate behavioral view of institutions. Some purported social problems almost disappear if one adopts a more adequate model of human decision making. Yet new challenges emerge, in particular, that of free will.

Can a blind person see? The very idea seems paradoxical. And yet, if we conceive of “seeing” as the ability to generate internal mental representations that may contain visual details, the idea of blind vision becomes a concept worth investigating. This book examines the effects of blindness and other types of visual deficits on the development and functioning of the human cognitive system. Drawing on behavioral and neurophysiological data, it analyzes research on mental imagery, spatial cognition, and compensatory mechanisms at the sensorial, cognitive, and cortical levels in individuals with complete or profound visual impairment. The authors find that the brain does not need eyes to “see.” They address critical questions of broad importance: The relationship of visual perception to imagery and working memory and the extent to which mental imagery depends on normal vision; the functional and neural relationships between vision and the other senses; the specific aspects of the visual experience which are crucial to cognitive development or specific cognitive mechanisms; and the extraordinary plasticity of the brain—as illustrated by the way that, in the blind, the visual cortex may be reorganized to support other perceptual or cognitive functions. In the absence of vision, the other senses work as functional substitutes and are often improved—pointing to the importance of the other senses in cognition.

Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) suffer most visibly with such motor deficits as tremor and rigidity and less obviously with a range of nonmotor symptoms, including autonomic dysfunction, mood disorders, and cognitive impairment. The neuropsychiatric disturbances of PD can be as disabling as its motor disorders, but they have only recently begun to be studied intensively by clinicians and scientists. This book examines the major neuropsychiatric syndromes of PD in detail and offers a cognitive theory that accounts for both their neurology and their phenomenology. It offers a review of knowledge of such neuropsychiatric manifestations of PD as cognitive deficits, personality changes, speech and language symptoms, sleep disorders, apathy, psychosis, and dementia. The author argues that the cognitive, mood, and personality symptoms of PD stem from the weakening or suppression of the agentic aspects of the self. The author’s study aims to arrive at a better understanding of the human mind and its breakdown patterns in patients with PD. The human mind-brain is an elaborate and complex structure patched together to produce what we call the self. When we observe the disruption of the self structure, which occurs with the various neuropsychiatric disorders associated with PD, the author argues, we get a glimpse into the inner workings of the most spectacular structure of the self: The agentic self, the self that acts.

The essays in this book, on a range of topics in the cognitive neurosciences, report on the progress in the field over the years and reflect on the many groundbreaking scientific contributions and enduring influence of Michael Gazzaniga, “the godfather of cognitive neuroscience,” founder of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, founding editor of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, and editor of the major reference work, The Cognitive Neurosciences, now in its fourth edition (MIT Press, 2009). The essays, grouped into four sections, which are named after four of Gazzaniga’s books, combine science and a memoir in varying proportions and offer a survey of research in cognitive neuroscience. “The Bisected Brain” examines hemispheric topics pioneered by Gazzaniga at the start of his career; “The Integrated Mind” explores the theme of integration by domination; the wide-ranging essays in “The Social Brain” address subjects from genes to neurons to social conversations and networks; the topics explored in “Mind Matters” include evolutionary biology, methodology, and ethics.

The idea that a specific brain circuit constitutes the emotional brain (and its corollary, that cognition resides elsewhere) shaped thinking about emotion and the brain for many years. Recent behavioral, neuropsychological, neuroanatomy, and neuroimaging research, however, suggests that emotion interacts with cognition in the brain. This book moves beyond the debate over functional specialization, describing the many ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The amygdala is often viewed as the quintessential emotional region of the brain, but the book reviews findings revealing that many of its functions contribute to attention and decision making, critical components of cognitive functions. The book counters the idea of a subcortical pathway to the amygdala for affective visual stimuli with an alternate framework, the multiple waves model. Citing research on reward and motivation, the book also proposes the dual competition model, which explains emotional and motivational processing in terms of their influence on competition processes at both perceptual and executive function levels. The book considers the broader issue of structure-function mappings, and examines anatomical features of several regions often associated with emotional processing, highlighting their connectivity properties. The book argues that, as new theoretical frameworks of distributed processing evolve, a truly network view of the brain will emerge, in which “emotion” and “cognition” may be used as labels in the context of certain behaviors, but will not map cleanly into compartmentalized pieces of the brain.

Before this book was published in 1992, conceptual frameworks for brain function were based on the behavior of single neurons, applied globally. This book developed a different conceptual framework, based on large populations of neurons. This was done by showing that patterns of activities among the units in trained artificial neural network models had properties that resembled those recorded from populations of neurons recorded one at a time. It is one of the first books to bring together computational concepts and behavioral data within a neurobiological framework. Aimed at a broad audience of neuroscientists, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers, the book is written for both expert and novice. This anniversary edition offers a new preface by the authors that puts the book in the context of current research. This approach influenced a generation of researchers in the field of neuroscience. Even today, when neuroscientists can routinely record from hundreds of neurons using optics rather than electricity, and the 2013 White House BRAIN initiative heralded a new era in innovative neurotechnologies, the main message of this book is still relevant.

Although William James declared in 1890, “Everyone knows what attention is,” today, there are many different and sometimes opposing views on the subject. This fragmented theoretical landscape may exist because most of the theories and models of attention offer explanations in natural language or in a pictorial manner rather than providing a quantitative and unambiguous statement of the theory, and focus on the manifestations of attention instead of its rationale. This book develops a formal model of visual attention with the goal of providing a theoretical explanation for why humans (and animals) must have the capacity to attend, and uses the full breadth of the language of computation—rather than simply the language of mathematics—as the formal means of description. The result, the Selective Tuning model of vision and attention, explains attentive behavior in humans and provides a foundation for building computer systems that see with human-like characteristics. The overarching conclusion is that human vision is based on a general purpose processor which can be dynamically tuned to the task and the scene viewed on a moment-by-moment basis. The book offers an overview of attention theories and models, and a description of the Selective Tuning model, confining the formal elements to two chapters and two appendixes. The text is accompanied by more than 100 illustrations in black and white and color; additional color illustrations and movies are available on the book’s website.

Psychiatry is at a crossroads. Faced with challenges of diagnosis and treatment, it must balance analyses at both neurological and psychological levels. Issues of comorbidity, treatment stability, and questions of categorization vs. dimensionality all weigh heavily in current discussions, yet progress has been limited, at best. Computational neuroscience offers a new lens through which to view these issues. This volume presents the results of a unique collaboration between psychiatrists, computational and theoretical neuroscientists, and reveals the synergistic ideas, surprising results, and novel open questions that emerged. It outlines potential approaches to be taken and discusses the implications that these new ideas bring to bear on the challenges faced by neuroscience and psychiatry.

It is generally acknowledged that attachment relationships are important for infants and young children, but there is little clarity on what exactly constitutes such a relationship. Does it occur between two individuals (infant–mother or infant–father) or in an extended network? In the West, monotropic attachment appears to function as a secure foundation for infants, but is this true in other cultures? This volume offers perspectives from a range of disciplines on these questions. Contributors from psychology, biology, anthropology, evolution, social policy, neuroscience, information systems, and practice describe the latest research on the cultural and evolutionary foundations on children’s attachment relationships as well as the implications for education, counseling, and policy. The contributors discuss such issues as the possible functions of attachment, including trust and biopsychological regulation; the evolutionary foundations, if any, of attachment; ways to model attachment using the tools of information science; the neural foundations of attachment; and the influence of cultural attitudes on attachment. Taking an integrative approach, the book embraces the wide cultural variations in attachment relationships in humans and their diversity across nonhuman primates. It proposes research methods for the culturally sensitive study of attachment networks that will lead to culturally sensitive assessments, practices, and social policies.

The recognition of faces is a fundamental visual function that is important for social interaction and communication. Scientific interest in facial recognition has increased dramatically over the last decade. Researchers in such fields as psychology, neurophysiology, and functional imaging have published more than 10,000 studies on face processing. Almost all of these studies focus on the processing of static pictures of faces; however, little attention has been paid to the recognition of dynamic faces, faces as they change over time—a topic in neuroscience that is also relevant to a variety of technical applications, including robotics, animation, and human–computer interfaces. This book offers an interdisciplinary overview of recent work on dynamic faces from the biological and computational perspectives. The chapters cover a range of topics, including the psychophysics of dynamic face perception, results from electrophysiology and imaging, clinical deficits in patients with impairments of dynamic face processing, and computational models that provide insights about the brain mechanisms for the processing of dynamic faces. The book offers neuroscientists and biologists a reference for designing experiments and provides computer scientists with knowledge that will help them improve technical systems for the recognition, processing, synthesizing, and animating of dynamic faces.

It is now widely accepted that many organisms (including humans) don’t just react to the world using behavioral reflexes, but also, at times, decide what to do by relying on mental representations. More specifically, the behavior of many organisms is not simply triggered by a perception of the state of their environment, but inferred using higher-level mental states downstream from their perceptual states. What is far less clear is why this is the case: what benefits does representational decision making bring to an organism, and what implications do these benefits have for the exact role that mental representations play in an organism’s decision making machinery? In my book, I provide answers to these questions. Specifically, I defend a cognitive-efficiency-based account of the evolution of mental representations, according to which a key driver of the evolution of representational decision making is the fact that mental representations can enable an organism to save a number of cognitive resources and to adjust more easily to changed environments. I then apply this account to a number of open questions in different sciences, including: when should we expect cognition to essentially involve parts of the environment? When should we expect decision making to rely on simple, satisficing heuristics? When should we expect organisms to be altruistically motivated to help others? Along the way, I also respond to concerns about the plausibility of evolutionary psychological projects more generally.

This book explores the cognitive science of effortless attention and action. Attention and action are generally understood to require effort, and it is expected that under normal circumstances, effort increases to meet rising demand. Sometimes, however, attention and action seem to flow effortlessly despite high demand. Effortless attention and action have been documented across a range of normal activities—ranging from rock climbing to chess playing—and yet fundamental questions about effortlessness have gone largely unasked. This book draws from the field of cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, behavioral psychology, genetics, philosophy, and cross-cultural studies to address those questions. Starting from the premise that the phenomena of effortless attention and action provide an opportunity to test current models of attention and action, researchers—including effort as a cognitive resource—clarify topics such as the role of effort in decision-making, the neurophysiology of effortless attention and action, the role of automaticity in effortless action, expert performance in effortless action, and the neurophysiology and benefits of attentional training.

This classic book, first published in 1991, was one of the first to propose the “embodied cognition” approach in cognitive science. It pioneered the connections between phenomenology and science and between Buddhist practices and science—claims that have since become highly influential. Through this cross-fertilization of disparate fields of study, the book introduced a new form of cognitive science called “enaction,” in which both the environment and first person experience are aspects of embodiment. However, enactive embodiment is not the grasping of an independent, outside world by a brain, a mind, or a self; rather it is the bringing forth of an interdependent world in and through embodied action. Although enacted cognition lacks an absolute foundation, the book shows how that does not lead to either experiential or philosophical nihilism. Above all, the book's arguments were powered by the conviction that the sciences of mind must encompass lived human experience and the possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience. This revised edition includes introductions that clarify central arguments of the work and discuss and evaluate subsequent research that has expanded on the themes of the book, including the renewed theoretical and practical interest in Buddhism and mindfulness. A preface by the originator of the mindfulness-based stress-reduction program, contextualizes the book and describes its influence on his life and work.

There are many reasons for scholars to investigate empathy. Empathy plays a crucial role in human social interaction at all stages of life; it is thought to help motivate positive social behavior, inhibit aggression, and provide the affective and motivational bases for moral development; it is a necessary component of psychotherapy and patient–physician interactions. This book covers a wide range of topics in empathy theory, research, and applications, helping to integrate perspectives as varied as anthropology and neuroscience. The contributors discuss the evolution of empathy within the mammalian brain and the development of empathy in infants and children; the relationships among empathy, social behavior, compassion, and altruism; the neural underpinnings of empathy; cognitive versus emotional empathy in clinical practice; and the cost of empathy. Taken together, the contributions broaden the interdisciplinary scope of empathy studies, reporting on the knowledge of the evolutionary, social, developmental, cognitive, and neurobiological aspects of empathy and linking this capacity to human communication, including in clinical practice and medical education.

How do we make decisions? Perhaps surprisingly, conventional decision theory does not attempt to answer this question. It tells us only which behavioral choices we ought to make if we follow certain axioms. In real life, however, axioms play no role in people's decision making. Our choices are governed instead by cognitive mechanisms shaped over evolutionary time through the process of natural selection. From signal detection and memory to individual and social learning, evolution has created strong biases in how and when we process information, and it is these evolved cognitive building blocks that provide the foundation for our choices. An evolutionary perspective is thus necessary to shed light on the nature of how we and other animals make decisions. The authors of this book, who originate from a broad range of disciplines, including evolutionary biology, psychology, economics, anthropology, neuroscience, and computer science, engaged in a multidisciplinary discourse around the question of what it is exactly that evolution can tell us about our and other animals’ mechanisms of decision making. Human children, for example, differ from chimpanzees in their tendency to over-imitate others and copy obviously useless actions. Almost paradoxically, this divergence from our primate relatives sets up imitation as one of the important mechanisms underlying human decision making. In addition to exploring the origins of decision mechanisms, the evolutionary approach in this volume sheds light on why and when these mechanisms are robust, why they vary across individuals and situations, and how social life impacts our decisions.

The subject of the book is the culture of crisis and controversy that exists in contemporary mental health research, following the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and the National Institute of Mental Health’s declaration of it as unfit for guiding research in psychiatry. The book explores both the nature and sources of the crisis as well as whether and, if so, how, it can be overcome. It brings together a collection of original articles that develop and apply various analytical ideas and strategies from the philosophy of science, and from other relevant areas of philosophy and science, with the aim of clarifying some aspects of the current crisis and the associated extraordinary science. The themes of the chapters include understanding the research domain of mental illness, clarifying the nature of the problems that constitute the current crisis, identifying key substantive and methodological assumptions concerning classification and research focused on the domain of mental illness, identifying ideas bearing on how best to respond to the current crisis with respect to the scientific research agenda, and constructively addressing the tension between pursuing a progressive scientific research program concerning mental illness and maintaining a place of prominence for individual persons and their contexts.