Subject collection: Psychology (246 titles, 1978–2015)

Themes play a central role in our everyday communication: we have to know what a text is about in order to understand it. Intended meaning cannot be understood without some knowledge of the underlying theme. This book helps to define the concept of ‘themes’ in texts and how they are structured in language use.

Much of the literature on Thematics is scattered over different disciplines (literature, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science), which this detailed collection pulls together in one coherent overview. The result is a new landmark for the study and understanding of themes in their everyday manifestation.

This study of the workings of neural networks in perception and understanding of situations and simple sentences shows that, and how, distributed conceptual constituents are bound together in episodes within an interactive/dynamic architecture of sensorial and pre-motor maps, and maps of conceptual indicators (semantic memory) and individuating indicators (historical, episodic memory). Activation circuits between these maps make sensorial and pre-motor fields in the brain function as episodic maps creating representations, which are expressions in consciousness. It is argued that all consciousness is episodic, consisting of situational or linguistic representations, and that the mind is the whole of all conscious manifestations of the brain. Thought occurs only in the form of linguistic or image representations. The book also discusses the role of consciousness in the relationship between causal and denotational semantics, and its role for the possibility of representations and rules. Four recent controversies in consciousness research are discussed and decided along this model of consciousness:

• Is consciousness an internal or external monitoring device of brain states?

• Do all conscious states involve thought and judgement?

• Are there different kinds of consciousness?

• Do we have a one-on-one correspondence between certain brain states and conscious states.



The book discusses also the role of consciousness in the relationship between causal and denotational semantics, and its role for the possibility of representations and rules. (Series A)

This volume, based on the first two, identifies the verbal and nonverbal personal and environmental components of narrative and dramaturgic texts and the cinema — recreated in the first through the ‘reading act’ according to gaze mechanism and punctuation — and traces the coding-decoding processes of the characters’ semiotic-communicative itinerary between writer-creator and reader-recreator. In our total experience of a play or film we depend on the sensory and intellectual relationships between performers, audience and the environment of both, in a temporal dimension starting on the way to the theater and ending as one comes out. Two chapters discuss the speaking face and body of the characters and the explicit and implicit (at times ‘unstageable’) paralanguage, kinesics and quasiparalinguistic and extrasomatic and environmental sounds in the novel, the theater and the cinema, and the functions of personal and environmental silences. Another shows the functions, limitations and problems of punctuation systems in the creative-recreative processes and how a few new symbols and modifications would avoid some ambiguities. The stylistic, communicative and technical functions of nonverbal repertoires in the literary text are then identified as enriching critical analysis and offering new perspectives in translation. Finally, ‘literary anthropology’ (developed by the author in the 1970s) is is presented as an interdisciplinary area based on synchronic and diachronic analyses of the literatures of the different cultures as a source of anthropological and ethnological data. Nearly 1200 quotes from 170 authors and 291 works are added to those in the first two volumes.

In a progressive and systematic approach to communication, and always through an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, this first volume presents culture as an intricate grid of sensible and intelligible sign systems in space and time, identifying the semiotic and interactive problems inherent in intercultural and subcultural communication according to verbal-nonverbal cultural fluency. The author lays out fascinating complexity of our direct and synesthesial sensory perception of people and artifactual and environmental elements; and its audible and visual manifestations through our ‘speaking face’, to then acknowledge the triple reality of discourse as ‘verbal language-paralanguage-kinesics’, which is applied through two realistic models: (a)for a verbal-nonverbal comprehensive transcription of interactive speech, and (b)for the implementation of nonverbal communication in foreign-language teaching. The author presents his exhaustive model of ‘nonverbal categories’ for a detailed analysis of normal or pathological behaviors in any interactive or noninteractive manifestation; and, based on all the previous material, his equally exhaustive structural model for the study of conversational encounters, which suggests many applications in different fields, such as the intercultural and multisystem communication situation developed in simultaneous or consecutive interpretating. 956 literary quotations from 103 authors and 194 works illustrate all the points discussed.

This book brings together linguistics and psycholinguistics. Text representation is considered a cognitive entity: a mental construct that plays a crucial role in both text production and text understanding.

The focus is on referential and relational coherence and the role of linguistic characteristics as processing instructions from a text linguistic and discourse psychology point of view. Consequently, this book presents various research methodologies: linguistic analysis, text analysis, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, argumentation analysis, and the experimental psycholinguistic study of text processing. The authors compare, test, and evaluate linguistic and processing theories of text representation.

A state of the art volume in an emerging field of interest, located at the very heart of our communicative behavior: the study of text and text representation.

Face Recognition: Cognitive and Computational Processes critically discusses current research in face recognition, leading to an original approach with criminological applications. The book covers

• The methodological and philosophical basis of research in face recognition.

• Findings and their explanations, conceptual issues, theories and models of face recognition

• The Catch Model (Rakover & Cahlon) for reconstructing (identifying) a face from memory, and other models and methods of face reconstruction.

• Conscious perception and recognition of faces.



The book also discusses original ideas on conceptualizing face perception and recognition in tasks of facial cognition, developing the Schema Theory and the Catch Model, and introducing Rakover & Cahlon's discovery of the proposed law of Face Recognition by Similarity (FRBS). (Series B)

This book reports a research program into one of the most controversial questions in the syntax — processing interface: The behavior of the parser at gap positions. While the work done is largely experimental, the results are analyzed both for their relevance to sentence processing and for their implications for competing syntactic frameworks. In particular the differing predictions of PPT and HPSG for structures with dislocated constituents are tested for their empirical adequacy. The author addresses a broad range of questions about gap processing and uses a broad range of methodologies to cut through the confounds which prevent previous work providing clear answers. Wh-movement, scrambling, raising, and equi structures are all addressed, and all current accounts of the experimental evidence evaluated. The results move the debate forward significantly, and provide clear confirmation of some non-trivial claims of generative grammar.

Volume 1 of Approaches to Bootstrapping focuses on early word learning and syntactic development with special emphasis on the bootstrapping mechanisms by which the child using properties of the speech input enters the native linguistic system. Topics discussed in the area of lexical acquisition are: cues and mechanisms for isolating words in the input; special features of motherese and their role for early word learning; the determination of first word meanings; memory and related processing capacities in early word learning and understanding; and lexical representation and lexical access in early language production.

The papers on syntactic development deal with the acquisition of grammatical prosodic features for learning language specific syntactic regularities.Volume 2 of Approaches to Bootstrapping focuses on the interaction between the development of prosodic and morphosyntactic knowledge as evidenced in the early speech of Dutch, English, German, Portugese, Spanish, Danish, Islandic, and Swedish children shedding new light on the relation between universal and language specific aspects of language acquisition. Another section of this volume deals with new approaches to language acquisition using ERP- techniques. The papers discuss in detail the relation between the development of language skills and changes in neurophysiological aspects of the brain. The potentials of these techniques for the development of new tools for an early diagnosis of children who are at risque for developmental language disorders are also pointed out.

The closing section contains a synopsis of interactionist approaches to language acquisition, a discussion of the genetic and experiential origin of primitive linguistic elements in acquisition, and a discussion of structural and developmental aspects of bird song in comparison to human language.

The two volumes making up Approaches to Bootstrapping present a state-of-the art interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic overview of recent developments in first language acquisition research.

The purpose of this book is to illustrate the relevance to linguistics today of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. Although largely ignored by linguists, Whitehead has in fact much to say as regards the cognitive processes underpinning language pattern. His theory of symbolism conceives of language as the ‘systematization of expression’, and relates meaning to feeling (in the broadest sense). The Whiteheadian perspective allows a synthesis of the psychological and the social approaches to language that does not fall into one or another fashionable form of reductionism. The volume represents a first application of Whitehead’s thinking to a broad range of linguistic phenomena, ranging from speech act theory to the production and comprehension of texts, from language acquisition to historical change and the evolution of language. It is argued that Whitehead’s holistic philosophy is uniquely suited to the view of language as an emergent phenomenon — regardless of whether one’s approach to cognition is via the ‘nativist’ or the ‘functionalist’ route.

The relationship between language and conceptualization remains one of the major puzzles in language research. This monograph addresses this issue by means of an in depth corpus based and experimental investigation of the major types of expressions of epistemic modality in Dutch, German and English. By adopting a systematic functional orientation, the book explains a whole range of peculiarities of epistemic expression forms (synchronically and diachronically), and it offers a clear perspective on which cognitive systems are needed to get from the concept of epistemic modality to its linguistic expression. On that basis the author postulates a sophisticated, layered view of human conceptualization. This book is of interest both to scholars working on modality and related semantic dimensions, and to the interdisciplinary field of researchers concerned with the cognitive systems involved in language use.

The Physical Nature of Consciousness contains twelve chapters that discuss recent and new perspectives on the relation between modern physics and consciousness.

Stuart Hameroff opens with an extended and updated exposition of the Penrose/Hameroff Orch-OR model, and subsequently addresses recent criticisms of quantum approaches to the brain. Evan Walker presents his view on consciousness from the perspective of a new approach to the integration of quantum theory and relativity. Friedrich Beck elaborates on the Beck/Eccles quantum approach to consciousness. Karl Pribram puts the holographic view on consciousness in perspective of his life long work. Peter Marcer and Edgar Mitchell explain the relevance of quantum holography for consciousness. Gordon Globus discusses the relation between postmodern philosophical theories and quantum consciousness. Chris Clarke develops a theory in terms of a specific type of formal logic to reconcile the phenomenology of consciousness with the physical world. Ilya Prigogine summarizes his view on complexity, and on the future of quantum theory, which goes beyond the present formalism, and goes on to comment on the problem of consciousness. Matti Pitkanen identifies the place for consciousness in a unifying topological geometro-dynamics theory. Colin McGinn argues against classical materialism. Dick Bierman gives an overview of anomalous phenomena. He identifies a decline effect, and discusses different possible interpretations. Philip Van Loocke closes the volume with a discussion on how deep teleology in cellular systems may relate to consciousness. (Series A)

This is the only book that examines the theory and data on the development of implicit and explicit memory. It first describes the characteristics of implicit and explicit memory (including conscious recollection) and tasks used with adults to measure them. Next, it reviews the brain mechanisms thought to underlie implicit and explicit memory and the studies with amnesics that initially prompted the search for different neuroanatomically-based memory systems. Two chapters review the Jacksonian (first in, last out) principle and empirical evidence for the hierarchical appearance and dissolution of two memory systems in animal models (rats, nonhuman primates), children, and normal/amnesic adults. Two chapters examine memory tasks used with human infants and evidence of implicit and explicit memory during early infancy. Three final chapters consider structural and processing accounts of adult memory dissociations, their applicability to infant memory dissociations, and implications of infant data for current concepts of implicit and explicit memory. (Series B)

This volume brings together papers from the areas of psychology, general linguistics, psycholinguistics, as well as from simultaneous interpreting. Their common focus is how theories and methodologies from various disciplines can be applied to the study of simultaneous interpreting, and also to suggest ways in which the study of simultaneous interpreting in its turn might contribute to knowledge in other areas. General topics dealt with include memory, language processing, bilingual processing, and second language acquisition. The articles more specifically focused on simultaneous interpreting discuss implications of the general topics and report on empirical studies on expertise in interpreting and on phonological interference in spoken language interpreting. Requirements for further interdisciplinary research in the context of simultaneous interpreting are considered. There is also a discussion of transcription conventions for simultaneous interpreting.

This interdisciplinary work addresses the question, What role should psychological conceptualization play for thinkers who believe that the brain is the organ of the mind? It offers readers something unique both by systematically comparing the writings of eliminativist philosophers of mind with the writings of the most committed proponents of biological psychiatry, and by critically scrutinizing their shared “anti-anthropomorphism” from the standpoint of a diagnostician and therapist. Contradicting the contemporary assumption that common sense psychology has already been proven futile, and we are just waiting for an adequate scientifically-based replacement, this book provides explicit philosophical and psychological arguments showing why, if they did not already have both cognitive and psychodynamic psychologies, philosophers and scientists would have to invent them to better understand brains. (Series A)

Many secrets of nature have been discovered since we have a better understanding of microstructures, for example subatomic spheres in physics and genetic structures in biochemistry. This book is set to convey an overview of the history, methods, findings and theoretical accounts of microgenetic research in consciousness and experimental psychology. The reader will find information about how conscious percepts unfold within only a fraction of a second. In a sense, and according to the microgenetic hypothesis, our subjectively experienced perceptual image undergoes formation similar to the process of developing a photograph. Yet the time scale of the awareness-related perceptual development is much finer and therefore accessible only to observation armed with special experimental procedures that are exposed in this book. In addition, the author presents empirical findings and theoretical interpretations from his own lab. Professor Talis Bachmann has been active in microgenetic research on attention, perception and consciousness for more than 25 years. (Series B)

These new studies by prominent neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers work toward a coherent framework for understanding emotion and its contribution to the functioning of consciousness in general, as an aspect of self-organizing, embodied subjects. Distinguishing consciousness from unconscious information processing hinges on the role of motivating emotions in all conscious modalities, and how emotional brain processes interact with those traditionally associated with cognitive function. Computationally registering/processing sensory signals (e.g. in the occipital lobe or area V4) by itself does not result in perceptual consciousness, which requires subcortical structures such as amygdala, hypothalamus, and brain stem. This interdisciplinary anthology attempts to understand the complexity of emotional intentionality; why the role of motivation in self-organizing processes is crucial in distinguishing conscious from unconscious processes; how emotions account for ‘agency’; and how an adequate approach to emotion-motivation can address the traditional mind-body problem through a holistic understanding of the conscious, behaving organism.

(Series B)

Unlike standard attempts to address the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, which assume our understanding of consciousness is unproblematic, this book begins by focusing on phenomenology and is devoted to clarifying the relations between intentionality, propositional content and experience. In particular, it argues that the subjectivity of experience cannot be understood in representationalist terms. This is important, for it is because many philosophers fail to come to terms with subjectivity that they are at a loss to provide a convincing solution to the mind-body problem. In this light the metaphysical problem is revealed to be a product of the misguided attempt to incorporate consciousness within an object-based schema, inspired by physicalism. A similar problem arises in the interpretation of quantum mechanics and this gives us further reason to look beyond physicalism, in matters metaphysical. Thus the virtues of absolute idealism are re-examined, as are the wider consequences of adopting its understanding of truth within the philosophy of science.

This book complements the arguments and investigations of The Presence of Mind, which it partners. (Series A)

Individual Differences in Conscious Experience is intended for readers with philosophical, psychological, or clinical interests in subjective experience. It addresses some difficult but important issues in the study of consciousness, subconsciousness, and self-consciousness. The book’s fourteen chapters are written by renowned, pioneering researchers who, collectively, have published more than fifty books and more than one thousand journal articles. The editors’ introductory chapter frames the book’s subtext: that mind-brain theories embodying the constraints of individual differences in subjective experience should be given greater credence than nomothetic theories ignoring those constraints. The next five chapters describe research and theory pertaining to individual differences in conscious sensations — specifically, individual differences in pain perception, phantom limbs, gustatory sensations, and mental imagery. Then, two succeeding chapters focus on individual differences in subconsciousness. The final six chapters address individual differences in altered states of self-consciousness — dreams, hypnotic phenomena, and various clinical syndromes.

(Series B)

Psychiatrists, psychologists, neurologists, linguists and speech pathologists currently have no coherent theory to explain why we curse and why we choose the words we do when we curse. The Neuro-Psycho-Social Theory of Speech draws together information about cursing from different disciplines and unites them to explain and describe the psychological, neurological, cultural and linguistic factors that underlie this startling phenomenon.

Why We Curse is divided into five parts. Part 1 introduces the dimensions and scope of cursing and outlines the NPS Theory, while Part 2 covers neurological variables and offers evidence for right brain dominance during emotional speech events. Part 3 then focuses on psychological development including language acquisition, personality development, cognition and so forth, while Part 4 covers the wide variety of social and cultural forces that define curse words and restrict their usage. Finally, Part 5 concludes by examining the social and legal implications of cursing, treating misconceptions about cursing, and setting the agenda for future research.

The work draws on new research by Dr. Jay and others and continues the research reported in his groundbreaking 1992 volume Cursing in America. A psycholinguistic study of dirty language in the courts, in the movies, in the schoolyards and on the streets.

The notion of stratification has played an important role in linguistics and evolutionary studies for some time, but its role in cognitive science has not yet been well articulated and identified. What is meant by stratification? What is the role and value of stratification in the contemporary study of cognition and consciousness? This collective volume speaks to these questions. The twelve articles in the book cover a range of relevant issues including

(a) the vertical dimension and modularity of visual processing, search and attention,

(b) the stratification of encoding and retrieval processes in memory,

(c) the hierarchical nature of conscious and unconscious components of memory, and

(d) the levels of awareness and varieties of conscious experience.

The volume presents stimulating and self-contained articles for researchers and students of experimental psychology and neuroscience, and is suitable for an advanced university course.

(Series B)

Metonymy in Language and Thought gives a state-of-the-art account of metonymic research. The contributions have different disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds in linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology and literary studies. However, they share the assumption that metonymy is a cognitive phenomenon, a “figure of thought,” underlying much of our ordinary conceptualization that may be even more fundamental than metaphor. The use of metonymy in language is a reflection of this conceptual status. The framework within which metonymy is understood in this volume is that of scenes, frames, scenarios, domains or idealized cognitive models.

The chapters are revised papers given at the Metonymy Workshop held in Hamburg, 1996.

Simultaneous interpretation is among the most complex of human cognitive/linguistic activities. This study, which will interest practitioners and trainers as well as linguists, draws more on linguistics-based theories of cognition in communication (cognitive semantics and pragmatics) than on the traditional information-processing approaches of cognitive psychology, and shows SI to be a valuable source of data on language and cognition.Starting from semantic representations of input and output in samples of professional SI from Chinese and German into English, the analysis explains the classic phenomena – anticipation, restoration of the implicit-explicit balance, and communicative re-packaging (‘re-ostension’) of the discourse – in terms of an intermediate cognitive model in working memory, allowing a more unitary view of resource management in the SI task. Relevance-theoretic analysis of the input discourse reveals rich pragmatic information guiding the construction of the appropriate contexts and the speaker’s underlying intentionalities. The course of meaning assembly is reconstructed in annotated synchronised transcripts.

The brain is the organ of knowledge and organizer of our abilities, our means of recognizing a face in a crowd, of conversing about anything we experience or imagine, of forming thoughts and developing ideas, of instantly understanding words coming rapidly in conversation. How does it manage all this? Does it represent information in symbols or in the connectivity of a vast network?Pathways of the Brain builds a theory to answer such questions. Using a top-down modeling strategy, it charts relationships among words and other products of the brain’s linguistic system to reveal properties of that system. Going beyond earlier linguistics, it sets three plausibility requirements for a valid neurocognitive theory: operational, developmental, and neurological: It must show how the linguistic system can operate for speaking and understanding, how it can be learned by children, and how it is implemented in neural structures. Unlike theories that leave linguistics isolated from science, it builds a bridge to biology.

Of interest to anthropologists, linguists, neurologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, and any thoughtful person interested in language or the brain.

The author is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences.

This is a philosophical study of qualitative consciousness, characteristic examples of which are pains, experienced colors, sounds, etc. Consciousness is analyzed as the having of qualia. Phenomenal properties or qualia are problematical because they lack appropriate bearers. The relation of having is problematical because none of the typical candidates for this relation — introspection, inner monitoring, higher level thoughts — is capable of explaining what it looks like to have a quale . The qualia problem is solved by introducing a bundle theory of phenomenal objects. Phenomenal objects are bundles of qualia. Thus there is no need for independent qualia bearers. The having problem is solved by introducing a bundle theory of the self. To have a quale is for it to be in the bundle one is. Thus no further relations are needed to explain how qualia are had. This study strives for phenomenological adequacy. Thus the first-person point of view dominates throughout. (Series A)