As humans, we often differentiate ourselves from other animals by our intelligence and ability to learn, but are these distinctions always so simple?Covering theories of learning, influences on intelligence, animal intelligence and test performance, Lund discusses the fascinating debates that shape our understanding of this area.Whatever your level of study, this balanced introduction will allow you to look critically at the main theories and cement your understanding of in...

Whilst attention is a term commonly used in everyday life, for many years psychologists have struggled in their attempts to explain what it actually means. Attention and Pattern Recognition introduces the main psychological research on attention and the methods that have been used to study it. It also examines the subdivisions of focused and divided attention and explores how people recognise patterns and faces. The Routledge Modular Psychology series is a completely new approach ...

Animal Cognition looks at how non-human animals process information from their environment. Nick Lund has written an accessible and engaging account of this area of comparative psychology. The book contains chapters on animal navigation (including homing behaviour and migration), animal communication methods and research into animal language, and attempts to teach language to non-human animals. A chapter on memory includes models of memory in non-human animals and discusses the im...

This book fulfils the need for a clear overview of this area of cognitive psychology which encompasses both language and thought. Focusing on goal directed thinking and decision making, Nick Lund looks at the relationship between our grasp of language and our problem solving abilities. Different positions on the issues are contextualised and discussed in a way suitable for the AQA-A A-Level syllabus. Supplementary detail means that the book will also be valuable to other A-Level specificat...

Teachers are often told that new teaching methods and materials are 'based on the latest research'. But what does this mean in practice? This book introduces you to some of the language acquisition research that will help you not just to evaluate existing materials, but also to adapt and use them in a way that fits what we currently understand about how languages are learned.

A New York Times bestseller: "A passionate and convincing case for the sophistication of nonhuman minds." —Alison Gopnik, The AtlanticHailed as a classic, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? explores the oddities and complexities of animal cognition—in crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, chimpanzees, and bonobos—to reveal how smart animals really are, and how we’ve underestimated their abilities for too long. Did ...

'It is not often I can use "accessible" and "phenomenology" in the same sentence, but reading the new book, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis…certainly provides me the occasion to do so. I can say this because these authors provide an engaging and clear introduction to a relatively new analytical approach' - The Weekly Qualitative ReportInterpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is an increasingly popular approach to qualitative inquiry. This handy text covers i...

There have been many books, movies, and even TV commercials featuring Neandertals--some serious, some comical. But what was it really like to be a Neandertal? How were their lives similar to or different from ours? In How to Think Like a Neandertal, archaeologist Thomas Wynn and psychologist Frederick L. Coolidge team up to provide a brilliant account of the mental life of Neandertals, drawing on the most recent fossil and archaeological remains. Indeed, some Neandertal remains are not fos...

What is it like to be a swift, flying at over one hundred kilometres an hour? Or a kiwi, plodding flightlessly among the humid undergrowth in the pitch dark of a New Zealand night? And what is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise?Bird Sense addresses questions like these and many more, by describing the senses of birds that enable them to interpret their environment and to interact with each other. Our affinity for birds i...

Whether we grow up with one, two, or several languages during our early years of life, many of us will learn a second, foreign, or heritage language in later years. The field of Second language acquisition (SLA, for short) investigates the human capacity to learn additional languages in late childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, after the first language --in the case of monolinguals-- or languages --in the case of bilinguals-- have already been acquired. Understanding Second Language A...

**A FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZENAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, SMITHSONIAN, AND WALL STREET JOURNALA major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences—what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful"—create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world.**In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch ...

Some of the most time-honored questions in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience center on the uniqueness of the human mind. How do we think? What makes us so different from all the other animals on planet Earth? What was the process that created the human mind? Is this process unique or can it be repeated on other planets? The book "On the Origin of the Human Mind" attempts to provide an answer to these questions. It is organized into three chapters: Chapter I "Uniqueness of the Human ...