Cognition In Action

This revised textbook is designed for undergraduate courses in cognitive psychology. It approaches cognitive psychology by asking what it says about how people carry out everyday activities: how people organize and use their knowledge in order to behave appropriately in the world in which they live.; Each chapter of the book starts with an example and then uses this to introduce some aspect of the overall cognitive system. Through such examples of cognition in action, important components of the cognitive system are identified, and their interrelationships highlighted. Thus the text demonstrates that each part of the cognitive system can only be understood properly in its place in the functioning of the whole.; This edition features increased coverage of neuropsychological and connectionist approaches to cognition.

Recognizing faces - perceiving and identifying objects; reading words - sight and sound in recognizing patterns; telling sheep from goats - categorizing objects; reaching for a glass of beer - planning and controlling movements; tapping your head and rubbing your stomach - doing two things at once; doing mental arithmetic - holding information and operations for a short time; answering the question - planning and producing speech; listening to a lecture - perceiving, understanding, or ignoring a spoken message; witnessing an accident - encoding, storing, and retrieving memories; celebrating a birthday - memory of your past, in the present and for the future; arriving in a new city - acquiring and using spatial knowledge; investigating a murder - making inferences and solcing problems; diagnosing an illness - uncertainty and risk in making decisions.

Alan F. Collins, Philip Levy, Peter E. Morris, Mary M. Smyth