Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings

Daniel J. Levitin

MIT Press, 2002 - Medical - 862 pages

Scientists from many disciplines, including physics, chemistry, biology, and neuroscience, contribute to the study of cognition. Cognitive psychology, the science of the human mind and of how people process information, is at the core of empirical investigations into the nature of mind and thought.

This anthology is based on the assumption that cognitive psychology is at heart empirical philosophy. Many of the core questions about thought, language, perception, memory, and knowledge of other people's minds were for centuries the domain of philosophy. The book begins with the philosophical foundations of inquiry into the nature of mind and thought, in particular the writings of Descartes, and then covers the principal topics of cognitive psychology including memory, attention, and decision making.

The book organizes a daunting amount of information, underlining the essentials, while also introducing readers to the ambiguities and controversies of research. It is arranged thematically and includes many topics not typically taught in cognition courses, including human factors and ergonomics, evolutionary psychology, music cognition, and experimental design.

The contributors include: Daniel Dennett, Daniel Kahneman, Jay McClelland, Donald Norman, Michael Posner, Stephen Palmer, Eleanor Rosch, John Searle, Roger Shepard, and Anne Treisman.

Contents

• Visual Awareness: 3
• Where Am I?: 23
• Can Machines Think?: 35
• Neural Networks: 55
• The Appeal of Parallel Distributed Processing: 57
• Objections: 93
• Minds Brains and Programs: 95
• Experimental Design: 113
• Experimental Design in Psychological Research: 115
• Perception: 131
• Perception: 133
• Organizing Objects and Scenes: 189
• The Auditory Scene: 213
• Categories and Concepts: 249
• Principles of Categorization: 251
• Philosophical Investigations Sections 6578: 271
• The Exemplar View: 277
• Memory: 293
• Memory for Musical Attributes: 295
• Memory: 311
• Attention: 361
• Attention and Performance Limitations: 363
• Features and Objects in Visual Processing: 399
• HumanComputer Interaction: 415
• The Psychopathology of Everyday Things: 417
• Distributed Cognition: 443
• Music Cognition: 453
• Neural Nets Temporal Composites and Tonality: 455
• The Development of Music Perception and Cognition: 481
• Cognitive Psychology and Music: 503
• Expertise: 515
• Prospects and Limits of the Empirical Study of Expertise An Introduction: 517
• Three Problems in Teaching General Skills: 551
• Musical Expertise: 565
• Decision Making: 583
• Judgment under Uncertainty Heuristics and Biases: 585
• Decision Making: 601
• For Those Condemned to Study the Past Heuristics and Biases in Hindsight: 621
• Evolutionary Approaches: 637
• Adaptations Exaptations and Spandrels: 639
• Toward Mapping the Evolved Functional Organization of Mind and Brain: 665
• Language 1Language Acquisition: 683
• The Invention of Language by Children Environmental and Biological Influences on the Acquisition of Language: 685
• Language 2Language and Thought: 705
• Languages and Logic: 707
• Language 3Pragmatics: 717
• Logic and Conversation: 719
• Idiomaticity and Human Cognition: 733
• Intelligence: 751
• In a Nutshell: 753
• A Rounded Version: 761
• Individual Differences in Cognition: 779
• Cognitive Neuroscience: 817
• Localization of Cognitive Operations in the Human Brain: 819
• The Mind and Donald O Hebb: 831
• Imaging the Future: 841
• Index: 855

About the author

Daniel J. Levitin was born on December 27, 1957 in San Francisco, California. He studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and music at the Berkley College of Music before dropping out of college to become a record producer and professional musician. He returned to school in his thirties, where he studied cognitive psychology/cognitive science, receiving a B.A. from Stanford University in 1992 and a M.Sc. in 1993 and Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Oregon. He is a cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, and author. He runs the Levitin Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University. He has published extensively in scientific journals and music trade magazines such as Grammy and Billboard. He is also the author of several books including This Is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs, and The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings; A Bradford book
• Author: Daniel J. Levitin
• Editor: Daniel J. Levitin
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: MIT Press, 2002
• ISBN: 0262621592, 9780262621595
• Length: 862 pages
• Subjects: Medical / Mental Health; Psychology / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition; Psychology / General