Cognitive psychology

Sample

John Brockman

This Will Make You Smarter presents brilliant but accessible ideas to expand every mind. What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to the world's most influential thinkers. Their visionary answers flow from the frontiers of psychology, philosophy, economics, physics, sociology, and more. Surprising and enlightening, these insights will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and the world.

Sample

Nira Granott & Jim Parziale

Microdevelopment is the process of change in abilities, knowledge and understanding during short time-spans. This book presents a new process-oriented view of development and learning based on recent innovations in psychological research. Instead of characterizing abilities at different ages, researchers investigate processes of development and learning that evolve through time to determine progressive changes. With contributions from the foremost researchers in the field, this study will be essential reading for all interested in cognitive and developmental science. - Publisher.

Sample

Robert E. MacLaury

This book presents the results of the Mesoamerican Color Survey, which Robert E. MacLaury conducted in 1978-1981. Drawn from interviews with 900 speakers of some 116 Mesoamerican languages, the book provides a sweeping overview of the organization and semantics of color categorization in modern Mesoamerica. Extensive analysis and MacLaury's use of vantage theory reveal complex and often surprising relationships among the ways languages categorize colors. His findings offer valuable cross-cultural data for all students of Mesoamerica. In addition, because color and its categorization is a human universal, the model he proposes will be of interest to all linguists and cognitive scientists working on theories of categorization more generally.

Sample

Norbert Schwarz

This book introduces social science researchers to the "logic of conversation" developed by Paul Grice, a philosopher of language, who proposed the cooperative principle and a set of maxims on which conversationalists implicitly rely. Norbert Schwarz applies this framework to a wide range of topics, including research on person perception, decision making, and the emergence of context effects in attitude measurement and public opinion research. Experimental studies reveal that the biases generally seen in such research are, in part, a function of violations of Gricean conversational norms. The author discusses implications for the design of experiments and questionnaires and addresses the socially contextualized nature of human judgment.