The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS)

The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS)
Author: Robert A. Wilson
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 1106
Release: 2001-09-04
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780262731447

Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences have offered multidisciplinary ways of understanding the mind and cognition. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) is a landmark, comprehensive reference work that represents the methodological and theoretical diversity of this changing field. At the core of the encyclopedia are 471 concise entries, from Acquisition and Adaptationism to Wundt and X-bar Theory. Each article, written by a leading researcher in the field, provides an accessible introduction to an important concept in the cognitive sciences, as well as references or further readings. Six extended essays, which collectively serve as a roadmap to the articles, provide overviews of each of six major areas of cognitive science: Philosophy; Psychology; Neurosciences; Computational Intelligence; Linguistics and Language; and Culture, Cognition, and Evolution. For both students and researchers, MITECS will be an indispensable guide to the current state of the cognitive sciences.

Glossary of Morphology

Glossary of Morphology
Author: Federico Vercellone
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030513246

This book is a significant novelty in the scientific and editorial landscape. Morphology is both an ancient and a new discipline that rests on Goethe's heritage and re-forms it in the present through the concepts of form and image. The latter are to be understood as structural elements of a new cultural grammar able to make the late modern world intelligible. In particular, compared to the original Goethean project, but also to C.P. Snow's idea of unifying the “two cultures”, the fields of morphological culture that are the object of this glossary have profoundly changed. The ever-increasing importance of the image as a polysemic form has made the two concepts absolutely transitive, so to speak. This is concomitant with the emergence of a culture that revolves around the image, attracting the verbal logos into its orbit. Incidentally, even the hermeneutic relationship between past and present relies more and more on the image, causing deep changes in cultural environments. Form and image are not just bridging concepts, as in the field of ancient morphology, but real transitive concepts that define the state of a culture. From the Internet to smartphones, television, advertising, etc., we are witnessing – as Horst Bredekamp observes – an immense mass of images that fill our time and affect the most diverse areas of our culture. The ancient connection between science and art recalled by Goethe emerges with unusual evidence thanks to intersecting patterns and expressive forms that are sometimes shared by different forms of knowledge. Creating a glossary and a culture of these intersections is the task of morphology, which thus enters into the boundaries between aesthetics, art, design, advertising, and sciences (from mathematics to computer science, to physics, and to biology), in order to provide the founding elements of a grammar and a syntax of the image. The latter, in its formal quality, both expressive and symbolic, is a fundamental element in the unification of the various kinds of knowledge, which in turn come to be configured, in this regard, also as styles of vision. The glossary is subdivided into contiguous sections, within a complex framework of cross-references. In addition to the two curators, the book features the collaboration of a team of scholars from the individual disciplines appearing in the glossary.

Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics

Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics
Author: Ewa Dabrowska
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 724
Release: 2015-05-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110292025

Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on the assumptions that our linguistic abilities are firmly rooted in our cognitive abilities, that meaning is essentially conceptualization, and that grammar is shaped by usage. The Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides state-of-the-art overviews of the numerous subfields of cognitive linguistics written by leading international experts which will be useful for established researchers and novices alike. It is an interdisciplinary project with contributions from linguists, psycholinguists, psychologists, and computer scientists which will emphasise the most recent developments in the field, in particular, the shift towards more empirically-based research. In this way, it will, we hope, help to shape the field, encouraging methodologically more rigorous research which incorporates insights from all the cognitive sciences. Editor Ewa Dąbrowska was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship 2018.

Mind as Motion

Mind as Motion
Author: Robert F. Port
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 620
Release: 1995
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780262161503

The first comprehensive presentation of the dynamical approach to cognition. It contains a representative sampling of original, current research on topics such as perception, motor control, speech and language, decision making, and development.

Cognitive Semiotics

Cognitive Semiotics
Author: Per Aage Brandt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2020-05-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1350143324

Interrogating the relatively new field of cognitive semiotics, this book explores shared issues in cognitive science and semiotics. Building on research from recent decades, Per Aage Brandt investigates the potential of a cognitive semiotic approach to enhance our understanding of language, thought and semiosis in general. Introducing a critical, non-standard approach both to cognitive science and to semiotics, this book discusses the understanding of meaning and mind through four major dimensions; mental architecture, mental spaces, discourse coherence and eco-organization. Encompassing a rich variety of topics and debates, Cognitive Semiotics outlines several bridges between 'continental' and 'analytic' thinking in the study of semantics, pragmatics, discourse and the philosophy of language and mind.

Cognitive Semiotics

Cognitive Semiotics
Author: Claudio Paolucci
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2021-02-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030429865

This volume serves as a reference on the field of cognitive semantics. It offers a systematic and original discussion of the issues at the core of the debate in semiotics and the cognitive sciences. It takes into account the problems of representation, the nature of mind, the structure of perception, beliefs associated with habits, social cognition, autism, intersubjectivity and subjectivity. The chapters in this volume present the foundation of semiotics as a theory of cognition, offer a semiotic model of cognitive integration that combines Enactivism and the Extended Mind Theory, and investigate the role of imagination as the origin of perception. The author develops an account of beliefs that are associated with habits and meaning, grounded in Pragmatism, testing his Narrative Practice Semiotic Hypothesis on persons with autism spectrum disorders. He also integrates his ideas about the formation of the theory of mind with a theory of subjectivity, understood as self-consciousness which derives from semiotic cognitive abilities. This text appeals to students, professors and researchers in the field.

Toward a Cognitive Semantics

Toward a Cognitive Semantics
Author: Leonard Talmy
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 582
Release: 2003
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780262700986

V.1 concept structuring systems -- V.2 Typology and process in concept structuring.

Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Volume 1

Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Volume 1
Author: Leonard Talmy
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 574
Release: 2003-01-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0262700964

In this two-volume set, Talmy approaches the question of how language organizes conceptual material both at a general level and by analyzing a crucial set of particular conceptual domains: space and time, motion and location, causation and force interaction, and attention and viewpoint. One of a two-volume set defining the field of cognitive semantics. Leonard Talmy approaches the question of how language organizes conceptual material both at a general level and by analyzing a crucial set of particular conceptual domains: space and time, motion and location, causation and force interaction, and attention and viewpoint. Talmy maintains that these are among the most fundamental parameters by which language structures conception. By combining these conceptual domains into an integrated whole, Talmy shows, we advance our understanding of the overall conceptual and semantic structure of natural language. Volume one examines the fundamental systems by which language shapes concepts.

Cognitive Science

Cognitive Science
Author: Harald Maurer
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2021-07-08
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1351043501

The Mind and Brain are usually considered as one and the same nonlinear, complex dynamical system, in which information processing can be described with vector and tensor transformations and with attractors in multidimensional state spaces. Thus, an internal neurocognitive representation concept consists of a dynamical process which filters out statistical prototypes from the sensorial information in terms of coherent and adaptive n-dimensional vector fields. These prototypes serve as a basis for dynamic, probabilistic predictions or probabilistic hypotheses on prospective new data (see the recently introduced approach of "predictive coding" in neurophilosophy). Furthermore, the phenomenon of sensory and language cognition would thus be based on a multitude of self-regulatory complex dynamics of synchronous self-organization mechanisms, in other words, an emergent "flux equilibrium process" ("steady state") of the total collective and coherent neural activity resulting from the oscillatory actions of neuronal assemblies. In perception it is shown how sensory object informations, like the object color or the object form, can be dynamically related together or can be integrated to a neurally based representation of this perceptual object by means of a synchronization mechanism ("feature binding"). In language processing it is shown how semantic concepts and syntactic roles can be dynamically related together or can be integrated to neurally based systematic and compositional connectionist representations by means of a synchronization mechanism ("variable binding") solving the Fodor-Pylyshyn-Challenge. Since the systemtheoretical connectionism has succeeded in modeling the sensory objects in perception as well as systematic and compositional representations in language processing with this vector- and oscillation-based representation format, a new, convincing theory of neurocognition has been developed, which bridges the neuronal and the cognitive analysis level. The book describes how elementary neuronal information is combined in perception and language, so it becomes clear how the brain processes this information to enable basic cognitive performance of the humans.