Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings [Paperback]

Daniel J. Levitin (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Bradford Books | Publication Date: September 9, 2002

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Daniel J. Levitin is Assistant Professor of Psychology at McGill University, where he holds the Bell Chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communication and the FQRT Strategic Professor Chair in Psychology.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 832 pages
• Publisher: A Bradford Book (September 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262621592
• ISBN-13: 978-0262621595
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #949,713 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Daniel J. Levitin is the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Music at McGill University, Montreal, where he also holds appointments in the Program in Behavioural Neuroscience, The School of Computer Science, and the Faculty of Education. An award-winning teacher, he now adds best-selling author to his list of accomplishments as "This Is Your Brain on Music" and "The World in Six Songs" were both Top 10 best-sellers, and have been translated into 16 languages. Before becoming a neuroscientist, he worked as a session musician, sound engineer, and record producer working with artists such as Stevie Wonder and Blue Oyster Cult. He has published extensively in scientific journals as well as music magazines such as Grammy and Billboard. Recent musical performances include playing guitar and saxophone with Sting, Bobby McFerrin, Rosanne Cash, David Byrne, and Rodney Crowell.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting collection of articles, April 9, 2006

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Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Baltimore, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings (Paperback)

As defined by the editor of this book, cognitive psychology is a field that studies the information processing capabilities of the human mind. Having its origin in an actual college classroom, the book does give a good overview of some of the developments in cognitive psychology and can be read profitably by anyone interested in the field. Since it is targeted towards undergraduate students in cognitive psychology, articles are included that introduce the field both from an historical and a philosophical viewpoint. Those readers interested in artificial intelligence will also find many of the articles of interest, especially those that address the actual cognitive processes in the brain that are involved in problem solving or goal-setting. Philosophical argumentation on the `mind-body problem' occupies a portion of the book, but the space devoted to such speculative matters is refreshingly kept at a minimum. It is clear throughout the book that the editor wants to keep the mind-brain distinction intact.

One of the more interesting articles in this collection is the one by K.A. Ericsson and J. Smith on the empirical study of expertise. The identification and study of expertise is important not only from the standpoint of cognitive psychology but also in artificial intelligence, where it is becoming more important to identify when a machine has expertise in more than one domain. The authors have given the reader an overview of what they call the `original expertise approach'. Their goal is to first characterize expertise in a domain-independent way and then discuss chess as an example. Crucial to any study of expertise is being able to distinguish between outstanding individuals in a domain from those that are not. The authors also want to distinguish "stable" achievement from that which might be accidental or happen only once. But most importantly, they point to the need for a `control group' who, given the same opportunities to achieve, could be compared with the achievements of an individual deemed to be unusually talented. The author's `original expertise approach' tries to define conditions under which one can study critical performance and find out which of its components are responsible for making it superior performance. It is necessary in their approach to design a set of tasks in a given domain that illustrate superior performance and to be able to bring out this performance in actual laboratory conditions. This approach is therefore difficult to carry out, since the conditions in real life needed for superior performance are hard to replicate in the laboratory. Their discussion of chess performance is helpful in this light but it still leaves doubt as to why superior chess players can perform as well as they do and the exact nature of the cognitive processes that they use to attain superior performance in chess. Of course, one cannot observe directly these cognitive processes, and the authors recognize this. However, they argue that using the observations of certain tasks, one can study these processes by using an information-theoretic model of cognition.

In some research circles in artificial intelligence there is currently a great interest in creating machines that can deal with information in more than one domain without changing appreciably the "programming" or "software" that processes the information in these domains. Called `artificial general intelligence' by some, the goal of researchers in this field is to arrive at a notion of machine intelligence that models what is found in human intelligence: the ability of humans to solve problems in many different domains (sometimes concurrently). Those readers interested in these developments may find the article by J. Tooby and L. Cosmides on the functional organization of the mind and brain of some interest. The emphasis in this article is that the brain is a biological entity that has evolved to process information. The authors call the brain an `organ of computation', which means that as a physical structure it contains a collection of programs that process information, and that this physical structure exists because it contains these programs. The programs are considered to be the functional components of the brain, and they are there because they solved a particular type of problem in the past. The problems that had to be dealt with evidently had to be confronted over long time scales, in order for evolutionary adaptation to occur. In addition, in order to sophisticated structures to evolve, the brain had to confront nontrivial problems that require heavy computation. The authors emphasize, and this is very important for readers interested in artificial general intelligence, that there is no single algorithm that is able to solve every adaptive problem. The human mind is therefore composed of many different programs for solving different problems. The reverse engineering of the human brain will therefore involve the identification of those functional units and collections of computations that it uses in order to be biological successful. If these functional units are independent, then the algorithms themselves are independent, and thus there is no notion of `general intelligence' used by the human brain. Brains are built from adaptive problem-solving devices, though they may have incidental capabilities that may make them appear to be `generally intelligent'. This modular approach to the brain taken by the authors seems to be a reasonable one, and they recognize that more evidence must be accrued. And certainly an organism, human or not, will have a better chance of surviving if their neuronal systems or problem-solving abilities are independent of each other. If one module is damaged for example, the organism can still have the capability to deal with problems and issues that are confronted by the other undamaged modules.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Levitin again..., November 29, 2008

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RR "RR" (Texas, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings (Paperback)

Levitin is a good writer and his books are great to read. This one is no exception. He has a collection of chapters written by the best in the field. You should try this one. Amazon you are too good. I got this one in 3 days and they ensured that it was on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Student Review, January 18, 2003

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"carolinechochol" (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings (Paperback)

Far from being like the old, dry, boring Psychology books of yore, "Foundations of Cognitive Psychology", though a required text for the Cognitive Psychology students at McGill, is able to hold its own and rise above the competition. A collection of articles, ranging from the philosophical "Where Am I?" by D. Dennett to the downright scientific (for example "Features and Objects in Visual Processing" by A. Treisman), the book gives the reader and the student a sample of the many possible views and stances regarding Cognition. According to Webster's dictionary, Cognitive Psychology is defined as "relating to, or being conscious of mental activity (as thinking, remembering, learning or using language)." Levitin's "Foundations" proves that Cognition is much more complicated than just a simple definition in the dictionary. Students and interested readers will benefit from this text.