Psychology

The idea that more information and more computation yield better decisions has long shaped our vision of rationality. Yet humans and other animals typically rely on simple heuristics or rules of thumb to solve adaptive problems, focusing on one or a few important cues and ignoring the rest, and shortcutting computation rather than striving for as much as possible. In this book, the authors argue that in an uncertain world, more information and computation are not always better, and instead ask when, and why, less can be more. The answers to these questions constitute the idea of ecological rationality, as explored in the chapters in this book: how people can be effective decision makers by using simple heuristics that fit well to the structure of their environment. When people wield the right tool from the mind’s adaptive toolbox for a particular situation, they can make good choices with little information or computation—enabling simple strategies to excel by exploiting the reliable patterns in the world to do some of the work. Heuristics are not good or bad, “biased” or “unbiased,” on their own, but only in relation to the setting in which they are used. The authors show heuristics and environments fitting together to produce good decisions in domains including sports competitions, the search for a parking space, business group meetings, and doctor/patient interactions. The message of Ecological Rationality is to study mind and environment in tandem. Intelligence is not only in the mind but also in the world, captured in the structures of information inherent in our physical, biological, social, and cultural surroundings.

Signal detection theory describes how an observer makes decisions about weak, uncertain, or ambiguous events or signals. It is widely applied in psychology, medicine, and other related fields. This book describes the theory, explains its mathematical basis, and shows how to separate the observer's sensitivity to a signal from his or her tendency to say “yes” or “no.” Both detection of an event and discrimination between two events are treated. Chapters 1-4 describe the basic form of the signal-detection model and how to use it; Chapters 5-7 extend the model to different procedures such as identification of a signal; Chapters 8-10 expand it to other methods and distributions; and Chapter 11 describes the statistical treatment of detection data.

When people communicate face to face they don't just exchange verbal information. Rather, communication encompasses the whole body. Communication partners synchronize their body sway, and mimic or imitate each other's body postures and actions. They produce a multitude of manual and facial gestures that help to illustrate what is being said, show how communication partners feel, or reveal verbal deception. Moreover, face-to-face communication takes place in shared contexts where partners jointly attend and refer to the same objects, often while working on joint tasks such as carrying a table or repairing a car together. Traditionally, communication research has neglected these parts of communication using the engineering model of signal transmission as the main theoretical metaphor. This book takes a new look at recent empirical findings in the cognitive and neurosciences, showing that the traditional approach is insufficient, and it presents a new interdisciplinary perspective, the Embodied Communication perspective. The core claim of the Embodied Communication perspective is that human communication involves parallel and highly interactive couplings between communication partners. These couplings range from low-level systems for performing and understanding instrumental actions, like the mirror system, to higher systems that interpret symbols in a cultural context.

To understand the mind and its place in Nature is one of the great intellectual challenges of our time, a challenge that is both scientific and philosophical. How does cognition influence an animal's behaviour? What are its neural underpinnings? How is the inner life of a human being constituted? What are the neural underpinnings of the conscious condition? This book approaches each of these questions from a scientific standpoint. But it contends that, before we can make progress on them, we have to give up the habit of thinking metaphysically, a habit that creates a fog of philosophical confusion. From this post-reflective point of view, the book argues for an intimate relationship between cognition, sensorimotor embodiment, and the integrative character of the conscious condition. Drawing on insights from psychology, neuroscience, and dynamical systems, it proposes an empirical theory of this three-way relationship whose principles, not being tied to the contingencies of biology or physics, are applicable to the whole space of possible minds in which humans and other animals are included. The book provides a joined-up theory of consciousness.

Human activity and thought is embedded within and richly structured by space. The spatial mind has detailed knowledge of the world that surrounds it—it remembers where objects are, what they are, and how they are arranged relative to one another. It can navigate through spaces to locate and retrieve objects, or it can direct the actions of others through language. It can use maps to find out the way from one city to the next, or it can navigate using a virtual map to locate a missing computer file. But where do these abilities come from? What is the developmental origin of the spatial mind? This book examines how the spatial mind emerges from its humble origins in infancy to its mature, flexible, and skilled adult form. Each chapter presents research and theory that asks the following questions: what changes in spatial cognition occur over development? And how do these changes come about? The book provides conceptual as well as formal theoretical accounts of developmental processes at multiple levels of analysis (e.g. genes, neurons, behaviors, social interactions), providing an overview of general mechanisms of cognitive change. In addition, commentators place these advances in the understanding of spatial cognitive development within the field of spatial cognition more generally. This book sheds light on how the experiences of thinking about and interacting in space through time foster and shape the emerging spatial mind.

Do our emotions stop us being rational? For thousands of years, emotions have been thought of as obstacles to intelligent thought. This view has been challenged in recent years by both philosophers and scientists. In this book leading thinkers from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience challenge this commonly held view of emotion in a series of chapters.

This book reorients modern psychology by finding a viable middle ground between the study of nerve cells and cultural analysis. The emerging field of ecological psychology focuses on the “human niche” and our uniquely evolved modes of action and interaction. Rejecting both mechanistic cognitive science and reductionistic neuroscience, the book offers a new psychology that combines ecological and experimental methods to help us better understand the ways in which people and animals make their way through the world. The book provides a comprehensive treatment of ecological psychology and a unique synthesis of the work of Darwin, neural Darwinism, and modern ecologists with James Gibson's approach to perception. The book presents detailed discussions on communication, sociality, cognition, and language—topics often overlooked by ecological psychologists. Other issues covered include ecological approaches to animal behaviour, neural mechanisms, perception, action, and interaction.

The term ‘episodic memory’ refers to our memory for unique, personal experiences, that we can date at some point in our past — our first day at school, the day we got married. Episodic memory is a topic of interest to psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. How are such memories stored in the brain, why do certain memories disappear (especially those from early in childhood), what causes false memories (memories of events we erroneously believe have really taken place)? Since this book was first published, few books have been published on this topic. In recent years however, many of the assumptions made about episodic memory have had to be reconsidered as a result of new techniques, which have allowed us a far deeper understanding of episodic memory. In this book three researchers in the topic of memory have brought together a team of contributors from the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience, to present an account of what we know about this fundamentally important topic.

From childhood, each of us develops our own personal set of theories and beliefs about the world in which we live. Given the impossibility of knowing about every event that can ever take place, we use cognitive short cuts to try to predict and make sense of the world around us. One of the fundamental pieces of information we use to predict future events, and make sense of past events, is ‘frequency’ — how often has such an event happened to us, or how often have we observed a particular event? With such information we will make inferences about the likelihood of its future appearance. We will make judgements, assess risk, or even consumer decisions, on the basis of this information. We also form associations between events that frequently occur together, and even (often incorrectly) attribute causality between one event and the other as a result of their simultaneous appearance. How is it though that we process such information? How does our brain deal with information on frequencies? How does such information influence our behaviour, beliefs, and judgements? This book brings together research on this subject from both cognitive psychology and social psychology.

This book presents new ideas for why the acceptance and understanding of evolution and related concepts is so difficult for both children and adults. Drawing from diverse fields, the contributors include the foremost researchers and practitioners in the study of children’s cognitive development, science education, teaching of evolution, and the design and evaluation of formal and informal instruction of evolution. The book brings together a unique collection of researchers, educators, and practitioners, who met and discussed many of the ideas incorporated in this volume at regional and national meetings funded by the National Science Foundation. The chapters and the overall book integrate cutting edge ideas that emerged from these meetings.