The Structure of Time

The Structure of Time
Author: Vyvyan Evans
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2004-03-05
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9027293783

One of the most enigmatic aspects of experience concerns time. Since pre-Socratic times scholars have speculated about the nature of time, asking questions such as: What is time? Where does it come from? Where does it go? The central proposal of The Structure of Time is that time, at base, constitutes a phenomenologically real experience. Drawing on findings in psychology, neuroscience, and utilising the perspective of cognitive linguistics, this work argues that our experience of time may ultimately derive from perceptual processes, which in turn enable us to perceive events. As such, temporal experience is a pre-requisite for abilities such as event perception and comparison, rather than an abstraction based on such phenomena. The book represents an examination of the nature of temporal cognition, with two foci: (i) an investigation into (pre-conceptual) temporal experience, and (ii) an analysis of temporal structure at the conceptual level (which derives from temporal experience).

Cognition in the Wild

Cognition in the Wild
Author: Edwin Hutchins
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 1996-08-26
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0262581469

Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation—its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory—"in the wild." Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system. Introducing Navy life and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation (adopting David Marr's paradigm)—to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that are larger than an individual. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition, pointing to the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations. A Bradford Book

The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition

The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
Author: Michael Tomasello
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2015-08-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0674660323

Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from. Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes place within it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. In his discussions of language, symbolic representation, and cognitive development, Tomasello describes with authority and ingenuity the "ratchet effect" of these capacities working over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops. He also proposes a novel hypothesis, based on processes of social cognition and cultural evolution, about what makes the cognitive representations of humans different from those of other primates. Lucid, erudite, and passionate, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition will be essential reading for developmental psychology, animal behavior, and cultural psychology.

Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time
Author: Dean Buonomano
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2017-04-04
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0393247953

"Beautifully written, eloquently reasoned…Mr. Buonomano takes us off and running on an edifying scientific journey." —Carol Tavris, Wall Street Journal In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, leading neuroscientist Dean Buonomano embarks on an "immensely engaging" exploration of how time works inside the brain (Barbara Kiser, Nature). The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time, but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological movement and enables "mental time travel"—simulations of future and past events. These functions are essential not only to our daily lives but to the evolution of the human race: without the ability to anticipate the future, mankind would never have crafted tools or invented agriculture. This virtuosic work of popular science will lead you to a revelation as strange as it is true: your brain is, at its core, a time machine.

Temporal Cognition: Its Development, Neurocognitive Basis, Relationships to Other Cognitive Domains, and Uniquely Human Aspects

Temporal Cognition: Its Development, Neurocognitive Basis, Relationships to Other Cognitive Domains, and Uniquely Human Aspects
Author: Patricia J. Brooks
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2019-11-04
Genre:
ISBN: 2889631516

Humans manifest an acute awareness of the passage of time and capacity for mental time travel, i.e., the ability to mentally place oneself in the past or future, as well as in counterfactual or hypothetical situations. The ability to perceive, estimate, and keep track of time involves multiple forms of representation (temporal concepts and frames of reference) and sensory modalities. Temporal cognition plays a critical role in various forms of memory (e.g., autobiographical memory, episodic memory, prospective memory), future-oriented thinking (foresight, planning), self-concepts, and autonoetic consciousness. This Research Topic addresses the myriad ways that temporal cognition impacts human behavior, how it develops, its clinical relevance, and the extent to which aspects of temporal cognition are uniquely human. Papers in this Research Topic focus on the following: 1) Low-level perceptual mechanisms that track durations, intervals, and other temporal features of stimuli. 2) Inter-relatedness of temporal reasoning and language development. 3) Temporal cognition in children with autism. 4) Cross-domain mappings between space and time across visual and auditory modalities. 5) Assessing mental time travel as a uniquely human capacity. 6) Implications of individual differences in temporal processing for health and well-being.

What Makes Us Smart

What Makes Us Smart
Author: Samuel Gershman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2021-10-19
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0691225990

How a computational framework can account for the successes and failures of human cognition At the heart of human intelligence rests a fundamental puzzle: How are we incredibly smart and stupid at the same time? No existing machine can match the power and flexibility of human perception, language, and reasoning. Yet, we routinely commit errors that reveal the failures of our thought processes. What Makes Us Smart makes sense of this paradox by arguing that our cognitive errors are not haphazard. Rather, they are the inevitable consequences of a brain optimized for efficient inference and decision making within the constraints of time, energy, and memory—in other words, data and resource limitations. Framing human intelligence in terms of these constraints, Samuel Gershman shows how a deeper computational logic underpins the “stupid” errors of human cognition. Embarking on a journey across psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and economics, Gershman presents unifying principles that govern human intelligence. First, inductive bias: any system that makes inferences based on limited data must constrain its hypotheses in some way before observing data. Second, approximation bias: any system that makes inferences and decisions with limited resources must make approximations. Applying these principles to a range of computational errors made by humans, Gershman demonstrates that intelligent systems designed to meet these constraints yield characteristically human errors. Examining how humans make intelligent and maladaptive decisions, What Makes Us Smart delves into the successes and failures of cognition.

The Nature of Cognition

The Nature of Cognition
Author: Robert J. Sternberg
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 760
Release: 1999
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780262692120

This book is the first to introduce the study of cognition in terms of the major conceptual themes that underlie virtually all the substantive topics.

Language, Cognition, and Human Nature

Language, Cognition, and Human Nature
Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2013-11
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0199328749

Collects for the first time Steven Pinker's most influential scholarly work on language and cognition. Pinker is a highly eminent cognitive scientist, and these essays emphasize the importance of language and its connections to cognition, social relationships, child development, human evolution, and theories of human nature.

Psychophysics Beyond Sensation

Psychophysics Beyond Sensation
Author: Christian Kaernbach
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2004-05-20
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1135633665

This volume presents a series of studies that expand laws, invariants, and principles of psychophysics beyond its classical domain of sensation. This book's goal is to demonstrate the extent of the domain of psychophysics, ranging from sensory processes, through sensory memory and short-term memory issues, to the interaction between sensation and action. The dynamics and timing of human performance are a further important issue within this extended framework of psychophysics: Given the similarity of the various cortical areas in terms of their neuroanatomical structure, it is an important question whether this similarity is paralleled by a similarity of processes. These issues are addressed by the contributions in the present volume using state-of-the-art research methods in behavioral research, psychophysiology, and mathematical modeling. The book is divided into four sections. Part I presents contributions concerning the classical domain of psychophysical judgment. The next two parts are concerned with elementary and higher-order processes and the concluding section deals with psychophysical models. The sections are introduced by guest editorials contributed by independent authors. These editorials present the authors' personals view on the respective section, providing an integrated account of the various contributions or highlighting their focus of interest among them. While also voicing their own and sometimes different point of view, they contribute to the process of discussion that makes science so exciting. This volume should be of great interest to advanced students in neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, neuropsychology, and related areas who seek to evaluate the range and power of psychological work today. Established scientists in those fields will also appreciate the variety of issues addressed within the same methodological framework and their multiple interconnections and stimulating "cross-talk."

The Expression of Time

The Expression of Time
Author: Wolfgang Klein
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2009-03-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110199033

Time is the most fundamental category of human cognition and action, and all human languages have developed many devices to express it. These include verbal categories, such as tense and aspect, but also adverbials, particles, and principles of discourse organisation. This book is intended as a tutorial for the study of how time is expressed in natural languages. Its chapters take the reader through a number of foundational issues, such as the various notions of time and the various means to express it; other chapters are devoted to more specific questions, such as the acquisition of time, its modelling in formal semantics and in computational linguistics, or how its expression can be empirically investigated.