Search Results

Intervention Studies

K. Warner Schaie

in Developmental Influences on Adult Intelligence: The Seattle longitudinal study

This chapter reports the results of the cognitive intervention studies and their long-term follow-up and replication with new cohorts, as part of the Seattle Longitudinal Study. These studies lead to ... More

This chapter reports the results of the cognitive intervention studies and their long-term follow-up and replication with new cohorts, as part of the Seattle Longitudinal Study. These studies lead to the conclusion that, for many persons, cognitive decline in old age may be a function of disuse rather than deterioration of the physiological substrates of cognitive behavior. A brief five-hour training program on the abilities of Inductive Reasoning and Spatial Orientation involving individual tutorials was designed to improve the performance of participants above the age of sixty-four years. Participants were assigned either to training in the ability on which they had declined or randomly to one of the two training conditions if they had declined or remained stable on both abilities.Less

Kairos (and Affectio)

Claudio Ciborra

in The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems

Turbulent economic times put improvisation at the centre stage of business management and organization studies. In principle, when reconstructing improvised decision making, symbolic representations ... More

Turbulent economic times put improvisation at the centre stage of business management and organization studies. In principle, when reconstructing improvised decision making, symbolic representations of the ongoing problem can be drawn, algorithms can be identified, and problem solving programmes can be written. But, once improvisation gets analysed as quick design and simultaneous implementation of plans of action, factoring early feedback from execution, where has its magic gone? Can such an analysis offer anything new or alternative to the prevailing managerial and systems models that put at the centre of their discourse information, knowledge modelling, and planning? To overcome such an impasse, there is a need to assess the intellectual roots of situated action, of which improvisation is considered a special case, in phenomenology.Less

The Role of Psychology in an Agent-Centered Theory of Science

Ronald N. Giere

in Psychology of Science: Implicit and Explicit Processes

The question that frames this chapter is how humans have managed to learn such amazing things as the age of the universe. After briefly reviewing logical, methodological, historical, and social ... More

The question that frames this chapter is how humans have managed to learn such amazing things as the age of the universe. After briefly reviewing logical, methodological, historical, and social approaches to this question, the chapter focuses on contributions of the cognitive study of science. This leads to a comparison of the cognitive study of science and the psychology of science, which study how fundamental cognitive mechanisms operate in the context of generating scientific knowledge. There is, however, a second way humans use their psychological powers in the pursuit of knowledge, namely, by designing material and symbolic artifacts that greatly increase their cognitive powers. The resulting physical-computational-human systems have been incorporated into the cognitive sciences as “distributed cognitive systems.” The chapter proposes adoption of an agent-centered approach, in which ever more ubiquitous distributed cognitive systems can be fully cognitive without being fully computational.Less

Instituting Cognitive Science

Jamie Cohen-Cole

in The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature

This chapter examines development of and changes in the research culture at Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies. The directors applied their psychological expertise in how humans think and learn ... More

This chapter examines development of and changes in the research culture at Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies. The directors applied their psychological expertise in how humans think and learn to design a research environment that would maximize the chances for acquiring reliable knowledge about world—specifically, about the nature of human thinking. They saw learning as, fundamentally, the acquisition of new structures of thought and of new tools with which to think. Therefore what was important was not simply facts that people learned or scientists discovered. Rather more significant were the procedures, forms of mental representation, and heuristic methods that enabled individuals to have original forms of ideas, novel hypotheses, and techniques for investigating the world. Accordingly the Center was organized along interdisciplinary lines in order to facilitate the construction of new theories and new scientific tools while establishing the disciplined study of human cognition on a stable foundation. Several years later, once its work was well under way, the Center's culture became multidisciplinary. Rather than emphasizing the creation of cognitive science by sharing, invention, location, discussion and stabilization of new research techniques, the Center's new multidisciplinary atmosphere involved researchers working in parallel.Less

Perspectival Knowledge and Distributed Cognition

in Scientific Perspectivism

The argument that scientific knowledge is perspectival has proceeded largely by reflecting on the actual practice of science itself. The argument that theorizing is perspectival did, however, appeal ... More

The argument that scientific knowledge is perspectival has proceeded largely by reflecting on the actual practice of science itself. The argument that theorizing is perspectival did, however, appeal to a conception of modeling derived largely from the philosophy of science. Nevertheless, for the most part, the conclusion that scientific knowledge is perspectival stands on its own. This chapter now seeks additional support for this conclusion from another source, the cognitive study of science. Many of the activities of scientists are directed toward the acquisition of new knowledge. Because acquiring knowledge is indisputably a cognitive activity, we can say that, to a large extent, science is a cognitive activity. It is thus an appropriate object for the application of the concepts and methods of the cognitive sciences. The chapter considers only one concept from the cognitive sciences, that of distributed cognition. It is argued that much of the cognitive activity of scientists involves the operation of distributed cognitive systems, most of which incorporate the sorts of instruments and models that have been characterized as perspectival.Less

The Situational Logic of Vraisemblance

Karin Kukkonen

in A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel

This chapter connects neoclassical criticism with today’s cognitive approaches to literature conceptually by introducing the notion of “situational logic,” derived from Karl Popper. For a literary ... More

This chapter connects neoclassical criticism with today’s cognitive approaches to literature conceptually by introducing the notion of “situational logic,” derived from Karl Popper. For a literary text, the situational logic refers to the world, characters, and actions of the narrative. Its shape can be described by the neoclassical rules, which cover different dimensions of the narrative and create its overall vraisemblance. Different choices for this situational logic are always possible and will be discussed in relation to alternative versions of the main narratives in the case studies. In addition, the chapter introduces the key cognitive approaches as they correspond to the overarching neoclassical model of literature and interact with each other in the framework of situational logic. Finally, this chapter addresses the historical context from which the texts emerge.Less

Virtual Manifesto for a Cognitive Approach to Literary Studies

Terence Cave

in Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism

This ‘virtual manifesto’ outlines a programme for future directions in cognitive literary study, defining its objectives and emphasizing the key notion of ‘thinking with literature’: literature as an ... More

This ‘virtual manifesto’ outlines a programme for future directions in cognitive literary study, defining its objectives and emphasizing the key notion of ‘thinking with literature’: literature as an instrument of cognition for writers, readers and critics.Less

Implications for Cognitive Studies of Musical Expressiveness

Catherine J. Stevens

in Expressiveness in music performance: Empirical approaches across styles and cultures

Studies of expressiveness in music from a cognitive psychological perspective have, until now, tended to analyze emotional response to music as a proxy for expression. The present collection, ... More

Studies of expressiveness in music from a cognitive psychological perspective have, until now, tended to analyze emotional response to music as a proxy for expression. The present collection, together with contemporary views of cognition as extended, situated, distributed, and embodied, point to the significance of cultural, social and historical influences on what it is to be expressive. Building from these updated assumptions, this brief prospective for cognitive studies discusses multimodal and inter-sensory expressiveness in music, song as a natural intersection of speech and music, and the importance of investigating diverse musical materials, performance settings, and genres. The challenge for cognitive psychology is to develop sophisticated ways of observing, recording, analyzing, and interpreting musical phenomena that connect across levels of description. The knitting together of micro and macro levels of description via theory is The Next Big Thing.Less

Introduction

Vanessa Joosen

in Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media

The introduction addresses the urgent need to study intergenerational relationships and situates the connection between childhood and old age in a historical context and within age studies. The main ... More

The introduction addresses the urgent need to study intergenerational relationships and situates the connection between childhood and old age in a historical context and within age studies. The main theoretical concepts on which the authors in this volume rely are introduced: drawing on cognitive studies, they treat the connection between childhood and old age as a “root metaphor” (Lakoff & Johnson) and study age not as a biological given, but as a social performance. A performative take on age in fiction involves terminological challenges, and the introduction situates ways of defining age and phases in the life course in a multinational, multimedia context. It also offers some pragmatic solutions for discussing age despite these challenges. Finally, the introduction establishes three basic patterns in the way that old age and childhood are connected: affinity, complementarity, and conflict. Each pattern is discussed in detail with reference to the contributions in the volume.Less

Beyond Meaning: Differing Fates of Some Modernist Poets’ Investments of Belief in Sounds

Natalie Gerber

in Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form

Modernist American poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams insisted on the values of linguistic sound beyond the semantic. Stevens focused on the modulations of the sounds ... More

Modernist American poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams insisted on the values of linguistic sound beyond the semantic. Stevens focused on the modulations of the sounds and lexical stresses of individual words within the meter. Frost and Williams focused on the less predictable intonational contours of phrases and sentences (although for Frost, the intonational contours play with and against the metrical pattern, whereas for Williams, lines tend to align with intonational phrases, turning prosodic speech tunes into a prosodic verse measure). Drawing on recent cognitive studies that pertain to the processing of speech sound and birdsong, this article suggests a need to revise critical assessments of the poets’ investments of belief in sound; it also considers why, given this research, Frost’s theory of sentence sounds has, perhaps unfairly, fared a worse critical reception.Less

The Curse of Realism

Karin Kukkonen

in 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found its Feet

This chapter challenges the assumption that throughout history the novel gets progressively better at realism and at matching its language in cognitive processes. It characterises this assumption as ... More

This chapter challenges the assumption that throughout history the novel gets progressively better at realism and at matching its language in cognitive processes. It characterises this assumption as “the curse of realism,” which retroactively imposes standards from the nineteenth-century novel onto texts from earlier periods and evaluates them as lacking stylistic and narrative achievements that they never aimed for. A counter-model, based on embodied cognition and predictive, probabilistic cognition, is proposed. This allows cognitive approaches to literature to move away from a teleological perspective (where the novel improves its match with cognition) and towards a dialectic perspective (where literary texts can relate to cognition in ways that are not inherently more accurate than others). This chapter lays the overall theoretical foundations for the case studies in the following chapters.Less

The Vernacular Concept of Innateness

Paul Griffiths, Edouard Machery, and Stefan Linquist

in Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2

There have been several philosophical analyses of the concept of innateness which lead to an assumption that there is a single, consistent notion of innateness apart from its usage in the cognitive ... More

There have been several philosophical analyses of the concept of innateness which lead to an assumption that there is a single, consistent notion of innateness apart from its usage in the cognitive studies. This chapter illustrates that these investigations each apply one aspect of the vernacular concept of innateness while disregarding its other equally important features. It provides evidence supporting this argument by delving into a pre-scientific or vernacular comprehension of innateness. It then discusses the concept of folk biology and suggests a structure of vernacular innateness based on it. It also presents experimental studies testing this proposal and concludes that the concept of innateness is better understood through biological critic instead of philosophical analyses.Less