Cognitive Psychology

The study of attention is central to psychology. This book presents the science of attention in a larger social context, which includes our ability voluntarily to choose and act upon an object of thought. The volume is based on fifty years of research involving behavioral, imaging, developmental, and genetic methods. It describes three brain networks of attention that carry out the functions of obtaining and maintaining the alert state, orienting to sensory events, and regulating responses. The book ties these brain networks to anatomy, connectivity, development, and socialization, and includes material on pathologies that involve attentional networks as well as their role in education and social interaction.

How does motivation work? The classic answer is that people are motivated to approach pleasure and avoid pain, that they are motivated by “carrots and sticks.” But to understand human motivation, it is necessary to go beyond pleasure and pain. What people want is to be effective in their life pursuits, and there are three distinct ways that people want to be effective. They want to be effective in having desired results (value), which includes having pleasure but is not limited to pleasure. They want to be effective in managing what happens (control) and in establishing what's real (truth), even if the process of managing what happens or establishing what's real is painful. These three distinct ways of wanting to be effective go beyond just wanting pleasure, but there is even more to the story of how motivation works. These ways of wanting to be effective do not function in isolation. Rather, they work together. Indeed, the ways that value, truth, and control work together is the central story of motivation. By understanding how motivation works as an organization of value, truth, and control, we can re-think basic motivational issues, such the nature of personality and culture, how the motives of others can be managed effectively, and what is “the good life”.

The visual world of animals is highly diverse and often very different from the world that we humans take for granted. This book provides an extensive review of the latest behavioral and neurobiological research on animal vision, highlighting fascinating species similarities and differences in visual processing. It contains twenty-six chapters about a variety of species including: honeybees, spiders, fish, birds, and primates. The chapters are divided into six sections: perceptual grouping and segmentation, object perception and object recognition, motion perception, visual attention, different dimensions of visual perception, and the evolution of the visual system.

This book covers all aspects of vision—the overall organization, lightness, color, motion, depth, objects and faces, control of eye movements, adaptation and aftereffects, attention, visual memory, and circadian rhythms and pupillary reflex. Each chapter starts with the psychological phenomena of the aspect of vision involved, followed by where in the system that aspect is dealt with, then the properties of the cells in the relevant areas, and deficits found in humans and macaque monkeys after lesions of those areas. Selected references are given to both the original work in the area and to the most modern work with recordings from single cells in macaque and fMRI in humans. As a result of insights going back to the Greeks, Arabs, and nineteenth-century Germans, and considerable research by psychologists, anatomists, physiologists, and physicians since the 1940s, we now have a fairly complete picture of how the whole system works, and more is being learned every year. The book is intended to be a summary of all of this for both experts and those starting to study the subject.

Interdisciplinary research now receives a great deal of attention because of the rich, creative contributions it often generates. But a host of factors — institutional, interpersonal, and intellectual — also make a daunting challenge of conducting research outside one's usual domain. This book is a guide to the most effective avenues for collaborative and integrative research in the social, behavioral, and bio-medical sciences. It provides answers to questions such as what is the best way to conduct interdisciplinary research on topics related to human health, behavior, and development? Which are the most successful interdisciplinary research programs in these areas? How do you identify appropriate collaborators? How do you find dedicated funding streams? How do you overcome peer-review and publishing challenges? The book outlines the lessons that can be taken from the study, and then presents a series of case studies that reveal the most successful interdisciplinary research programs. These programs provide a variety of models of how best to undertake interdisciplinary research. Each of the chapters has carried out innovative, collaborative programs, and all give compelling accounts of the benefits of interdisciplinary research and the central strategies required to achieve them.

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. The main goal of this book is to try to identify some of the major phenomena in the field of cognitive aging, and to discuss issues relevant to the investigation and interpretation of them. It 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. Its principal aim is rather to stimulate readers to think about the big questions in cognitive aging research, and how they might best be answered.

Navigating the social world requires sophisticated cognitive machinery that, although present quite early in crude forms, undergoes significant change across the lifespan. This book reports on evidence that has accumulated on an unprecedented scale, showing us what capacities for social cognition are present at birth and early in life, and how these capacities develop through learning in the first years of life. The book highlights what is known about the discoveries themselves but also what these discoveries imply about the nature of early social cognition and the methods that have allowed these discoveries—what is known concerning the phylogeny and ontogeny of social cognition. Each chapter focuses on a single core question: Are babies aware of what is right and wrong? Why do children have the same implicit intergroup preferences that adults do? What does language do to the building of category knowledge?

Neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, neuroaesthetics, and neurotheology are just a few of the novel disciplines that have been inspired by a combination of ancient knowledge together with recent discoveries about how the human brain works. The mass media are full of news items featuring colour photos of the brain, that show us the precise location in which a certain thought or emotion, or even love occurs, hence leading us to believe that we can directly observe, with no mediation, the brain at work. But is this really so? Even throughout the developed world, the general public has been seduced into believing that any study, research article, or news report, accompanied by a brain image or two is more reliable and more scientific, than one featuring more mundane illustrations. This book questions our obsession with brain imaging. It discusses some of the familiar ideas usually associated with mind-body, brain-psyche, and nature-culture relationships, showing how the biased and unquestioning use of brain imaging technology could have significant cultural effects for all of us.

The ability to attend selectively to events in the world around us is a core cognitive function. It prevents distraction and enables humans and animals to dedicate perceptual, cognitive, and motor resources to deal with the most pressing current challenges. When attention systems of the brain are damaged by disease or trauma, the impact for the individual and society can be significant, and therefore, understanding the neural mechanisms of attention is a central goal in neuroscience. In addition, understanding how attention mechanisms operate is critical for advancing the important mission of developing the most effective training regimes for a wide range of duties, as well as for creating new methods for educating the world's growing population. This book addresses the basic neuroscience of how the brain controls the focus of attention, and how this focused attention influences sensory and motor processes. This book provides a selection of the models, mechanisms and findings in the neuroscience of attentional control and selection from leading authorities working in human and animal models, and incorporating an array of neuroscience methods from single neuron recordings to functional brain imaging, and advanced modeling. The book begins with chapters that describe attentional selection, relying largely on evidence from attention in vision. Subsequent chapters address attentional control mechanisms in cortical and subcortical brain networks. Finally, the role of attention in action, short-term memory, and emotion are discussed.

When one is immersed in the fascinating world of neuroscience findings, the brain might start to seem like a collection of “modules,” each specializes in a specific mental feat. But just like in other domains of Nature, it is possible that much of the brain and mind's operation can be explained with a small set of universal principles. Given exciting recent developments in theory, and empirical findings and computational studies, it seems that the generation of predictions might be one strong candidate for such a universal principle. This is the focus of this book. From the predictions required when a rat navigates a maze to food-caching in scrub-jays; from predictions essential in decision-making to social interactions; from predictions in the retina to the prefrontal cortex; and from predictions in early development to foresight in non-humans. The perspectives represented in this collection span a spectrum from the cellular underpinnings to the computational principles underlying future-related mental processes, and from systems neuroscience to cognition and emotion. In spite of this diversity, they share some core elements. Memory, for instance, is critical in any framework that explains predictions. In asking “what is next?” our brains have to refer to memory and experience on the way to simulating our mental future. But as much as this collection offers answers to important questions, it raises and emphasizes outstanding ones. How are experiences coded optimally to afford using them for predictions? How do we construct a new simulation from separate memories? How specific in detail are future-oriented thoughts, and when do they rely on imagery, concepts, or language?