This collection of research on object perception focuses on holistic and featural properties of objects, the mechanisms that produce such properties, how people choose one type of property over another, and how such choices are improved during the course of child development. The contributions consider alternative perceptual characterizations, the way in which such properties are represented in the mind, how particular properties are more useful in some kinds of tasks that humans perform, ...

A new theory is taking hold in neuroscience. It is the theory that the brain is essentially a hypothesis-testing mechanism, one that attempts to minimise the error of its predictions about the sensory input it receives from the world. It is an attractive theory because powerful theoretical arguments support it, and yet it is at heart stunningly simple. Jakob Hohwy explains and explores this theory from the perspective of cognitive science and philosophy. The key argument throughout The...

Reading is a highly complex skill that is prerequisite to success in many societies in which a great deal of information is communicated in written form. Since the 1970s, much has been learned about the reading process from research by cognitive psychologists. This book summarizes that important work and puts it into a coherent framework.The book’s central theme is how readers go about extracting information from the printed page and comprehending the text. Like its predecessor, th...

This volume is a result of mathematicians, cognitive scientists, mathematics educators, and classroom teachers combining their efforts to help address issues of importance to classroom instruction in mathematics. In so doing, the contributors provide a general introduction to fundamental ideas in cognitive science, plus an overview of cognitive theory and its direct implications for mathematics education. A practical, no-nonsense attempt to bring recent research within reach for practicing...

The nature of consciousness and the relationship between the mind and brain have become the most hotly debated topics in philosophy. This book explains and argues for a new approach called enactivism. Enactivism maintains that consciousness and all subjective thoughts and feelings arise from an organism's attempts to use its environment in the service of purposeful action. The authors admit that their perspective presents many problems: How does one distinguish real action from reaction? I...

The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition offers a systematic and accessible overview of the main psychological areas and theories in order to keep abreast of the ongoing paradigm shift.

This book evaluates the involvement of working memory in five central aspects of language processing: vocabulary acquisition, speech production, reading development, skilled reading, and comprehension. The authors draw upon experimental, neuropsychological and developmental evidence in a wide-ranging evaluation of the contribution of two components of working memory to each aspect of language. The two components are the phonological loop, which is specialised for the processing and mainten...

This important new book synthesizes relevant research on the learning of mathematics from birth into the primary grades from the full range of these complementary perspectives. At the core of early math experts Julie Sarama and Douglas Clements's theoretical and empirical frameworks are learning trajectories—detailed descriptions of children’s thinking as they learn to achieve specific goals in a mathematical domain, alongside a related set of instructional tasks designed to engender those...

When most people think of space, they think of physical space. However, visual space concerns space as consciously experienced, and it is studied through subjective measures, such as asking people to use numbers to estimate perceived distances, areas, angles, or volumes. This book explores the mismatch between perception and physical reality, and describes the many factors that influence the perception of space including the meaning assigned to geometric concepts like distance, the judgmen...

A variety of scientific disciplines have set as their task explaining mental activities, recognizing that in some way these activities depend upon our brain. But, until recently, the opportunities to conduct experiments directly on our brains were limited. As a result, research efforts were split between disciplines such as cognitive psychology, li

The nature of mental images and their relation to language has caused controversy amongst psychologists for years, and the so-called "imagery debate" is still unresolved. Fresh light is now being shed on this topic using recent findings in neuroscience and the development of behavioural studies. Reviewing state-of-the-art research in the field of imagery, visuo-spatial memory, spatial representation and language, with special emphasis on their interactions, the volume shows how, and to wha...

The plan for this volume emerged during the international Leipzig conference commemorating the centenary of the death of Gustav Fechner. The contributors suggested that while many features of modern psychological theory were anticipated by Fechner, many new theoretical approaches owe much more to him than often is realized. As such, they decided to honor Fechner by evaluating his own contribution to the founding of psychology and psychoanalysis, by deepening the foundations of psychologica...