Communication is one of the most challenging human phenomena, and the same is true of its paradigmatic verbal realization as a dialogue. Not only is communication crucial for virtually all interpersonal relations; dialogue is often seen as offering us also a paradigm for important intra-individual processes. The best known example is undoubtedly the idea of concep tualizing thinking as an internal dialogue, "inward dialogue carried on by the mind within itself without spoken sound", as Plato called it in the Sophist. At first, the study of communication seems to be too vaguely defmed to have much promise. It is up to us, so to speak, to decide what to say and how to say it. However, on eloser scrutiny, the process of communication is seen to be subject to various subtle constraints. They are due inter alia to the nature of the parties of the communicative act, and most importantly, to the properties of the language or other method of representation presupposed in that particuIar act of communication. It is therefore not surprising that in the study of communication as a cognitive process the critical issues revolve around the nature of the representations and the nature of the computations that create, maintain and interpret these representations. The term "repre sentation" as used here indicates a particular way of specifying information about a given subject.

Communication and Group Decision-Making takes stock of recent group communication research - with an explicit focus on communication processes. This book is recommended for academics, professionals and researchers in communication and organization

Emerging and currently available technologies offer great promise for helping older adults, even those without serious disabilities, to live healthy, comfortable, and productive lives. What technologies offer the most potential benefit? What challenges must be overcome, what problems must be solved, for this promise to be fulfilled? How can federal agencies like the National Institute on Aging best use their resources to support the translation from laboratory findings to useful, marketable products and services? Technology for Adaptive Aging is the product of a workshop that brought together distinguished experts in aging research and in technology to discuss applications of technology to communication, education and learning, employment, health, living environments, and transportation for older adults. It includes all of the workshop papers and the report of the committee that organized the workshop. The committee report synthesizes and evaluates the points made in the workshop papers and recommends priorities for federal support of translational research in technology for older adults.

One of the central problems in the study of modern cognition is the degree to which higher cognition is modularized: that is, how much are higher functions carried out by domain-specific, specialized, cognitive subsystems, rather than a highly general cognitive learning and inferring device? To date, ideas and proposals about modularity have been best developed in the study of vision and grammar. In the present volume, the usefulness of approaches employing modularity and domain specificity are further explored in papers on the development of biological thought, word meaning, symbols, and emotional development, as well as in the core area of grammar itself, by leading researchers in these fields. The volume also contains an introduction to some basic ideas and concepts in the study of modularity and domain-specificity, and some critical discussion of the overall problems of the modularity constraints approach to analyzing development.

ON THE FUTURE OF PERSPECTIVES When Patrick Bateson and Peter Klopfer offered me the editorship of Perspectives in 1992, the world of academic publishing was in one of its periodic upheavals. Subscriptions to series-even distinguished series such as Perspec tives-had been declining and individual volume prices had been rising, a trend that if continued could only result in the series pricing itself out of the market. In the course of the negotiations around the change of editors, the publishers offered a cost-cutting solution: change the production pattern to "camera ready" and elimi nate the costs of indexing and proofreading. While I could see the sense in this proposal, I was reluctant to accept it. Part of what I had always liked about the volumes in this series was that they were real books, intelligently proofread, nicely laid out, and provided with proper indexes. Thus, I in return offered a "Devil's bargain": the publisher should maintain the present quality of the series for two more volumes and make a renewed effort to advertise the series to our ethological and sociobiological colleagues, while I as the new series editor committed myself to a renewed effort to make Perspectives the publication of choice for writers who are trying to get their message out to the world intact and readers who are seeking clear, coherent, comprehensive and untrammeled presentations of authors' ideas and research programs.

Presents a small but representative sample of the main papers considered at the May 1995 colloquium, which focused on four themes: social action and cooperation, cognitive approaches in discourse processing, models of information in communication systems, and the scope and limits of cognitive simulation. Papers range from the extremely abstract to the extremely specific. Among the topics: contextual domains; formal semantics, geometry, and mind; collective goals and cooperation; a logical approach to reasoning about uncertainty; and building a collaborative interface agent. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR