Advances in Psychology Series

Based upon a conference held in Bethesda in 1985, this volume brings together the research and theoretical perspectives of experts in the developmental aspects of motor control, coordination, and skill in the mentally handicapped. This is accomplished within the context of cognition. Section I deals with the dynamics of controlling movement skill and the nature of the variables that mediate the learning of motor skills. Sections II and III examine the traditional area of research in motor behavior, i.e., the speed of information processing and reaction time paradigms. The last section discusses the issue of training to minimize the effects of mental retardation on motor behavior.

Wilson's book proposes an associationistic form of psychological theory which is opposed to the more extreme structuralist claims. It brings together a relatively novel combination of topics from psychology, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence which support a viable associationistic position.

From the human brain, event related potentials (ERPs) can be obtained which reflect psychological information processing. This book summarizes the theoretical and methodological aspects of research on the so-called ``endogenous'' components of the ERP. These components are invoked by psychological processing rather than evoked by the mere presentations of external stimuli.

Presenting a philosophical and psychological overview of the history of the concept of intelligence, this controversial text does not aim to supply yet another opinion on, or interpretation of the concept of intelligence, but rather attempts to find out how to approach this concept on a scientific level.

The contributors to this book are all distinguished, internationally-known specialists working in the motor control and learning area. The result is a unique collection of papers that discuss many aspects of this intricate and diverse subject and at the same time manage to provide the reader with a good overview of the major topics.

Apraxia is a term used to denote a disorder in the performance of limb, verbal and oral non-verbal gestures, with often preserved ability to perform these same gestures outside the clinical setting in the appropriate situation or environment. Over the past century and particularly in the past four decades, a great deal of research has focused on understanding the nature of this complex disorder. This book is a review of current approaches to the study of apraxia and related action sequencing disorders as well as an examination of the mechanisms thought to underly these disorders. Neuropathological processes associated with apraxia are evaluated and principles of motor control, handedness and bimanual coordination are considered as they relate to the study of apractic disorders.

Examining selected statistical and modeling approaches in psychology, the book concentrates on the topics of mental test theory and theory of measurement. The main objective is not only to present a critical view of the approaches suggested up until now, but also their reinterpretation, extension and enrichment by new theories and concepts, for example, formal theories of semiotics and knowledge, and a unifying theory of actions. The book also shows a relation between test theory and the foundations of fuzzy set theory. It presents new models of measurement tools and new measurement theories of concepts such as objective and subjective time, risk or utility, and discusses the cognitive foundations of these theories, namely the theory of perception and observability.

Cognition and Memory

Language and Comprehension

Current Issues in Theoretical Psychology

The 32 main papers, taken together, provide a comprehensive review of speech research by scientists who have made leading contributions to our understanding of the topics discussed. The papers are assembled within a coherent, problem-oriented structure.

Letter and Word Perception

Research on discourse (or text) processing has only recently come into its own. It builds on the work of text analysis which has a long and distinguished history, but modern developments in psychology (e.g. memory research), artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy have contributed to this emergence in the last decade as a lively and promising research area. This book contains 46 selected and edited contributions from the International Symposium held in Fribourg in 1981, and represents a truly international overview of the developments in research on written and oral discourse. The contributions have been grouped according to problem area and not according to methodology, with the intention of focusing on the important issues in the field of discourse processing and of showing how diverse approaches contribute to a better understanding of the problems involved. The main themes are: text structure, coherence, inference, memory processes, attention and control, goal perspectives, and educational implications.

The book deals with two focal issues: 1. The structural rules according to which information is organized in perception (Part I). 2. The rules on how pieces of information are integrated and transformed into judgements (Part II). Included in Part I are theories on neural mechanisms and models linking perception and memory. Part II refers to simple physical and complex semantic dimensions. Antecedents in animal behaviour are explored too. The book is intended for a broad readership; it should stimulate research which will link topics that have been traditionally separated. Features of the book are: - a synopsis of discrete, structural and quantitative aspects of perception linking perception with higher cognition and memory. - an overview on new approaches and findings from East and West on perceptual organization and rules inherent to judgement. - the chapters are strongly interconnected and didactical in tone. Introductions are designed to increase readability of the work.

This book reviews progress and describes original research in the cognitive psychology of the arts. The invited contributors are leading authorities, and the topics which they cover include psychological approaches to symbols and meaning in art, issues in experimental aesthetics, the development in children of artistic production and appreciation, and the perception of musical and pictorial material.

Contributed chapters by psychologists and behavioral biologists provide a broad coverage of animal behavior, and governing brain processes. Topics covered include: foraging behavior and strategies, economics and psychology, memory of events and space, time perception, expectancies, food preferences and diet selection, behavior variability and the concept of mind. The volume is designed to satisfy an intderdisciplinary audience, embracing the behavioristic tradition, biological and physiological approaches, and evolutionary theory as philosophical underpinnings to the chapters. Also achieved in this work is a good balance between empirical results and theory.

This volume contains the revised papers of an international symposium on research on fallacies, biases, and the development of decision behavior under uncertainty. The papers are organized in five main sections. The Introduction outlines the conceptual framework and how three of the sections - Cognitive Decision Research, Social Interaction, and Development and Epistemology - are interrelated and also how new fields, such as research into developmental questions, can be productively integrated. In the fifth section Comments are collected, which evaluate the impact of the contributions on decision research itself, and also on cognitive psychology, social psychology, economic theory, ant the discipline of mathematics education.

This book contains a number of chapters on the control and execution of skilled movements, as well as more general chapters on theoretical issues in skilled performance. The contributors have summarised their most recent research, and general themes and issues are presented in discussion chapters at the end of each section, thus providing a good general summary of the kind of research and theoretical frameworks developing in this area. The first section is concerned with the theoretical issues of programming and co-ordination. Issues raised in the second section are basic to much of the research reviewed in the volume. This section summarises the various theoretical positions in the recent debates on the role of cognitive processes in motor control and the usefulness of the ``psychomotor'' approach, and contains chapters based on individual papers which present relevant empirical findings. The third section deals with the learning and performance of skilled movements, containing papers with practical implications for everyday skills. The final section contains chapters on cognitive processes in skilled performance.

Under the title The Coordination and Regulation of Movements, an English language version of six of the most important papers of the Russian physiologist Nicholas Bernstein was published in 1967 (Pergamon Press Ltd.). That work has been out of print for some years, but in view of the frequency of its citation in recent works on movement control, a republication was considered desirable. However, since some of the papers in the first edition were written in the 1930's, it was felt that readers' interests would be better served if, after each chapter, an evaluation of the work and, where necessary, an update of the data in the light of more recent findings was included. Contributors of international renown provide such chapters.

Over a half-century of research has documented the fact that people of different ages perform at different levels on a variety of tests of cognitive functioning, and yet there are still no comprehensive theories to account for these phenomena. A Theory of Cognitive Aging is intended to begin intellectual discussion in this area by identifying major issues of controversy, and proposing a particular theoretical interpretation based on the notion that the rate of processing information slows down with increased age. Although still quite preliminary, the theoretical perspective is demonstrated to provide a plausible account for age-related differences in functioning on measures of memory, spatial ability and reasoning. The book has four aims: - To advocate a more explicitly theoretical approach to research in the area of cognitive aging. - To outline three important dimensions along which it is argued that any theory of cognitive aging phenomena must take a position. - To evaluate empirical evidence relevant to specific positions along those dimensions. - To summarize the major concepts of the current theory, and to describe its application to selected findings in the research literature.

This volume presents one possible conceptual analysis of the task of constructing a model of psychological reality, so that psychology's pluralistic state can be put into perspective. Chapters 1 and 2 specify the essential input assumptions of the analysis, establish the boundary conditions of the treatise, preview the kinds of decisions involved in the construction process, and present some necessary background information. Chapters 3 to 5 collectively abstract out possible psychological universes and recount the dominant classical and contemporary models of psychological reality framework. Chapters 6 to 9 focus on the philosophical input into psychology, especially as related to the nature of humanity, the mind-body problem, scientific explanation, and the discipline's two fundamental analytical categories: behavior and experience. Chapters 10 to 12 highlight many of the cultural and pragmatic constraints imposed on any model of psychological reality by considering the applied, contextual and relational aspects of psychology.

Differing Perspectives in Motor Learning, Memory, and Control

Graphonomics is the newly created term for the science of handwriting and other graphic skills. The Second International Conference on the Neural and Motor Aspects of Handwriting attracted contributions from experimental psychologists, neuropsychologists, neurologists, linguists, biophysicists, and computer scientists from 12 countries. This volume, the proceedings of the conference, features clinical studies of the neural basis of agraphia and dysgraphia from brain-damaged patients. The motor aspects of handwriting are further extended to new areas of interests. Research on handwriting in the English, Chinese and Japanese languages forms the first attempt in the field to investigate handwriting from the psycholinguistic perspective of different languages.

This book contains an edited selection of papers presented at the Eighth Research Conference on Subjective Probability, Utility and Decision Making, held in Budapest. Together they span a wide range of new developments in studies of decision making, the practice of decision analysis and the development of decision-aiding technology. The volume is arranged in sections: Societal Decision Making; Organizational Decision Making; Aiding the Structuring of Small Scale Decision Problems, and Tracing Decision Processes. The emphasis is on decision processes and structures and their applications, rather than formal modelling in isolation, thus reflecting current developments in research and practice which follow from the understanding of the nature and operation of decision theoretical models gained during the 1970's. The fifth section, A Symposium on the Validity of Studies on Heuristics and Biases, is of a different nature. The papers take stock of the considerable volume of work investigation ``heuristics and biases'' in decision making over the past decade, and their implication for theory and practice.

With essentially the same basis as the 1971 Abilities, Their Structure, Growth and Action, this new volume reflects the developments of subsequent years.

The subject matter of this book is subliminal perception and microgenetic perceptual processing, two important topics on the interface between perception and personality. It presents a different way of handling these topics, biological in its emphasis on process, humanistic in its focussing on the dynamics of individual experience. The reader will not only find new theoretical perspectives but a host of new, efficient and penetrating methods for analyzing problems of personality and psychopathology. The book is filled with empirical data supporting its theoretical and methodological claims. Main Features: - New perspectives on information processing in relation to personality. - New methods applicable in many fields, such as clinical psychology, developmental and personality psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, education (creativity), etc. - Constructive analysis and critical review of the fields of subliminal perception and microgenesis.

This volume comprises a selection of the papers presented at the 14th European Mathematical Psychology Group Meeting, held in Brussels, and three invited lectures. Presented are results and developments in mathematical psychology, especially in the theory of perception and learning, order and measurement, and data analysis.

This volume critically evaluates the present state of research in the domain of inferences in text processing and indicates new areas of research. The book is structured around the following theoretical aspects: - The representational aspect is concerned with the cognitive structure produced by the processed text, e.g. the social, spatial, and motor characteristics of world knowledge. - The procedural aspect investigates the time relationships on forming inferences, e.g. the point of time at which referential relations are constructed. - The contextual aspect reflects the dependence of inferences on the communicative embedding of text processing, e.g. on factors of modality and instruction.

This book is a collection of contemporary applications of psychological insights into practical human factors issues. The topics are arranged largely according to an information processing/energetic approach to human behavior. Consideration is also given to human-computer interaction and organizational design.

Spatial Neglect is one of the few areas in Neuropsychology where clinicians, psychologists and animal experimenters have succeeded in adopting a common language. The result of interaction between these three approaches has been some important new advances, which are presented in this volume. Apart from its clinical significance in neuropsychology, Spatial Neglect raises important questions in the field of behavioral neurosciences. In this volume, three aspects are examined: a) normal subjects, where new findings on spatial behavior are described. b) brain-lesioned subjects, where the classical studies on neglect are reconsidered in the light of new findings. c) animals, where new experimental situations allow a deeper understanding of the neural substrate.