Bøker av Michael R.W. Dawson

To answer the question of what cognitive psychology is you must first understand its theoretical foundations¿foundations which have often received very little attention in modern textbooks. Author Michael Dawson seeks to address this oversight by exploring the essential principles that have established and guided this unique field of psychological study. Beginning with the basics of information processing, Dawson explores what experimental psychologists infer about these processes, and considers what scientific explanations are required when we assume cognition is rule-governed symbol manipulation. From these foundations, psychologists can identify the architecture of cognition and better understand its role in debates about its true nature. What is Cognitive Psychology? asks questions that will engage both students and researchers, including: Do we need the computer metaphor? Must we assume thinking involves mental representations? Do machines¿or people¿or brains¿actually think? What is the "cognitive" in "cognitive neuroscience" and where is the mind? By establishing cognitive psychology¿s foundational assumptions in its early chapters, this book places the reader in a position to critically evaluate such questions.

Cognitive science arose in the 1950s when it became apparent that a number of disciplines, including psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, were fragmenting. Perhaps owing to the field's immediate origins in cybernetics, as well as to the foundational assumption that cognition is information processing, cognitive science initially seemed more unified than psychology. However, as a result of differing interpretations of the foundational assumption and dramatically divergent views of the meaning of the term information processing, three separate schools emerged: classical cognitive science, connectionist cognitive science, and embodied cognitive science. Examples, cases, and research findings taken from the wide range of phenomena studied by cognitive scientists effectively explain and explore the relationship among the three perspectives. Intended to introduce both graduate and senior undergraduate students to the foundations of cognitive science, Mind, Body, World addresses a number of questions currently being asked by those practicing in the field: What are the core assumptions of the three different schools? What are the relationships between these different sets of core assumptions? Is there only one cognitive science, or are there many different cognitive sciences? Giving the schools equal treatment and displaying a broad and deep understanding of the field, Dawson highlights the fundamental tensions and lines of fragmentation that exist among the schools and provides a refreshing and unifying framework for students of cognitive science.