This book summarizes the ideas about cognitive psychology expressed in the writings of medieval Europeans. Up until the 13th century, Christians who wrote about cognitive psychology, foremost of whom was St. Augustine, did so in the Neoplatonic tradition. The translation of the works of Aristotle and some of the works of Arab scholars into Latin during the 12th and 13th centuries brought a high level of sophistication to the theories. The author touches upon the works of (...) Augustine, Averro^Des, Avicenna, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and others. (shrink)

Reviews the general orientation of cognitive psychology, some contemporary difficulties and problems noted by cognitive psychologists, and apparent commonalities between phenomenological and cognitive psychologies. It is argued that the problems of cognitive psychology are inevitable consequences of its natural scientific orientation, which is far more traditional than it is revolutionary. A phenomenologically based, human science approach to psychology is offered as a solution of fundamental disciplinary problems. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

is normative in the sense that it aims to make recommendations for improving human judgment; it aims to have a practical impact on morally and politically significant human decisions and actions; and it studies normative, rational judgment qua rational judgment. These nonstandard ways of understanding ACP as normative collectively suggest a new interpretation of the strong replacement thesis that does not call for replacing normative epistemic concepts, relations, and inquiries with descriptive, causal ones. Rather, it calls for recognizing that the (...) aims and normative inquiries of epistemology and normative psychology have become intermutual in nature. Key Words: Heuristics and biases • applied cognitive psychology • normative psychology • rationality • naturalized epistemology • Epistemics • Applied Naturalized Epistemology • strong replacement • strategic reliabilism • ameliorative psychology. (shrink)

Quite unexpectedly, cognitive psychologists find their field intimately connected to a whole new intellectual landscape that had previously seemed remote, unfamiliar, and all but irrelevant. Yet the proliferating connections tying together the cognitive and evolutionary communities promise to transform both fields, with each supplying necessary principles, methods, and a species of rigor that the other lacks. (Cosmides and Tooby, 1994, p. 85).

Walsh (2020) underscores how dementia leads to a cognitive transformative experience, which can result in a change in preferences, values, and beliefs. This transformation supports placing greater...

This note brings together three phenomena leading to a tendency toward reductionism in cognitive psychology. They are the reification of cognitive processes into an entity called mind; the identification of the mind with the brain; and the congruence by analogy of the brain with the digital computer. Also indicated is the need to continue studying the effects upon behavior of variables other than brain function. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Posner & Raichle illustrate how neuroimaging blends profitably with neuropsychology and electrophysiology to advance cognitive theory. Recognizing that there are limitations to each of these techniques, we nonetheless argue that their confluence has fundamentally changed the way cognitive psychologists think about problems of the mind.

This handbook is an essential, comprehensive resource for students and academics interested in topics in cognitive psychology, including perceptual issues, attention, memory, knowledge representation, language, emotional influences, judgment, problem solving, and the study of individual differences in cognition.

The past three decades have witnessed a remarkable growth of research interest in the mind. This trend has been acclaimed as the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology. At the heart of this revolution lies the claim that the mind is a computational system. The purpose of this paper is both to elucidate this claim and to evaluate its implications for cognitive psychology. The nature and scope of cognitive psychology and cognitive science are outlined, the (...) principal assumptions underlying the information processing approach to cognition are summarised and the nature of artificial intelligence and its relationship to cognitive science are explored. The ‘computational metaphor’ of mind is examined and both the theoretical and methodological issues which it raises for cognitive psychology are considered. Finally, the nature and significance of ‘connectionism’—the latest paradigm in cognitive science—are briefly reviewed. (shrink)

Cognitive therapies are often biased in their assessment of clinical problems by their emphasis on the role of verbally-mediated thought in shaping our emotions, and in stressing the influence of thought upon feeling. Alternatively, a more phenomenological appraisal of psychological dysfunction suggests that emotion and thinking are complementary processes which influence each other. Cognitive psychology developed out of information-processing models, whereas phenomenological psychology is rooted in a philosophical perspective which avoids the assumptions of positivist methodology. But, (...) despite their different origins, the two disciplines overlap and complement each other. This book, originally published in 1995, illustrates how feeling states are a crucial component of mental health problems and, if adequately differentiated, can result in a greater understanding of mental health. (shrink)

It is frequently assumed that dreaming can be likened to such waking cognitive activities as imagination, analogical reasoning, and creativity, and that these models can then be used to explain instances of problem solving during dreams. This paper emphasizes instead the lack of reflexivity and intentionality within dreams, which undermines their characterization as analogs of the waking world, and opposes claims that dreams can complement and aid waking world problem solving. The importance of reflexivity in imagination, in analogical reasoning (...) and in creativity means that dreaming, being usually single-minded, cannot be subsumed into these categories. Freud’s hypothesis that dreams result from the translation of latent thoughts into manifest content is taken to support this idea of cognitive deficiency during dreaming. Dream content, however, can still represent and reflect the dreamer’s waking concerns. (shrink)

When faced with adverse circumstances, there may be a tendency for individuals, agencies, and governments to search for a target to assign blame. Our focus will be on the novel coronavirus outbreak, where racial groups, political parties, countries, and minorities have been blamed for spreading, producing or creating the virus. Blame—here defined as attributing causality, responsibility, intent, or foresight to someone/something for a fault or wrong—has already begun to damage modern society and medical practice in the context of the COVID-19 (...) outbreak. Evidence from past and current pandemics suggest that this tendency to seek blame affects international relations, promotes unwarranted devaluation of health professionals, and prompts a spike of racism and discrimination. By drawing on social and cognitive psychology theories, we provide a framework that helps to understand the effect of blame in pandemics, when people blame, whom they blame, and how blame detrimentally affects the COVID-19 response. Ultimately, we provide a path to inform health messaging to reduce blaming tendencies, based on social psychological principles for health communication. (shrink)

"Dr. Rubin has brought cognitive psychology into a wholly unprecedented dialogue with studies in oral tradition. The result is a truly new perspective on memory and the processes of oral tradition." --John Miles Foley, University of Missouri.

I offer support for the view that physicalist theories of cognition don't reduce to neurophysiological theories. On my view, the mind-brain relationship is to be explained in terms of evolutionary forces, some of which tug in the direction of a reductionistic mind-brain relationship, and some of which which tug in the opposite direction. This theory of forces makes possible an anti-reductionist account of the cognitive mind-brain relationship which avoids psychophysical anomalism. This theory thus also responds to the complaint which (...) arguably lies behind the Churchlands' strongest criticisms of anti-reductionism — namely the complaint that anti-reductionists fail to supply principled explanations for the character of the mind-brain relationship. While lending support to anti-reductionism, the view defended here also insures a permanent place for mind-brain reduction as an explanatory ideal analogous to Newtonian inertial motion or Aristotelian natural motion. (shrink)

Cognitive psychologists, like biologists, frequently describe mechanisms when explaining phenomena. Unlike biologists, who can often trace material transformations to identify operations, psychologists face a more daunting task in identifying operations that transform information. Behavior provides little guidance as to the nature of the operations involved. While not itself revealing the operations, identification of brain areas involved in psychological mechanisms can help constrain attempts to characterize the operations. In current memory research, evidence that the same brain areas are involved in (...) what are often taken to be different memory phenomena or in other cognitive phenomena is playing such a heuristic function. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, 0119, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093‐0119; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This short commentary argues that the potentiality argument against abortion derives its appeal from features embedded in our cognitive structure.

"Cognitive psychology," "cognitive neuroscience," and "philosophy of mind" are names for three very different scientific fields, but they label aspects of the same scientific goal: to understand the nature of mental phenomena. Today, the three disciplines strongly overlap under the roof of the cognitive sciences. The book's purpose is to present views from the different disciplines on one of the central theories in cognitive science: the theory of mental models. Cognitive psychologists report their research (...) on the representation and processing of mental models in human memory. Cognitive neuroscientists demonstrate how the brain processes visual and spatial mental models and which neural processes underlie visual and spatial thinking. Philosophers report their ideas about the role of mental models in relation to perception, emotion, representation, and intentionality. The single articles have different and mutually complementing goals: to introduce new empirical methods and approaches, to report new experimental results, and to locate competing approaches for their interpretation in the cross-disciplinary debate. The book is strongly interdisciplinary in character. It is especially addressed to researchers in any field related to mental models theory as both a reference book and an overview of present research on the topic in other disciplines. However, it is also an ideal reader for a specialized graduate course. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze a philosophical question (neutrality vs. theory-ladenness of observation) taking into consideration the empirical results of Cognitive Psychology (theories of perception). This is an important debate because the objectivity of science is at stake. In the Philosophy of Science there are two main positions with regard to observation, those of C. Hempel and N. R. Hanson. In the Philosophy of Mind there are also two important contrasting positions, those of J. Fodor (...) and Paul M. Churchland. I will analyze the consequences of recent theories of perception and vision developed within Cognitive Science for classical epistemological theses about observation. (shrink)

The subjective experience of time in depression has been described to be altered in complex ways, with sensations of particular slowness, delay or stillness being the most often named articulations. However, the attempts to provide empirical evidence to the phenomenon of “time slowing down in depression” have resulted in inconsistent findings. In consequence, the overall claim that depressive time somehow differs from ordinary time has often been discarded as unfounded. The article argues against such conclusion, contending that the described ambiguity (...) might be caused by the methods employed to assess the phenomenon under observation. In the first part of the article, a reconceptualization of the experience of time in depression is proposed on the grounds of classic and contemporary phenomenological psychiatry. This leads to identify the essential features of depressive time as described both in clinical and philosophical contexts. In the second part, a critique of the existing methods of time perception assessment is conducted, with a specific focus on duration estimation and time passage perception tasks. The above-mentioned core features serve as guidelines in discussing to what degree such methods fit the phenomenon at stake. Finally, an alternative and innovative method is put forward, that might not only help to explore the scope of existing methods but might itself present an alternative to such: the micro-phenomenological interview. (shrink)

The ArgumentScientific tools—measurement and calculation instruments, techniques of inference—straddle the line between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In discovery, new scientific tools suggest new theoretical metaphors and concepts; and in justification, these tool-derived theoretical metaphors and concepts are morelikely to be accepted by the scientific community if the tools are already entrenched in scientific practice.Techniques of statistical inference and hypothesis testing entered American psychology first as tools in the 1940s and 1950s and then as (...) class='Hi'>cognitive theories in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did psychologists resists statistical metaphors of mind prior to the institutionalization of inference techniques in their own practice; the cognitive theories they ultimately developed about “the mind as intuitive statistician” still bear the telltale marks of the practical laboratory context in which the tool was used. (shrink)