This book examines how people make decisions under risk and uncertainty in operational settings and opens the black box by specifying the cognitive processes that lead to human behavior. Drawing on economics, psychology and artificial intelligence, the book provides an innovative perspective on behavioral operations. It shows how to build optimization as well as heuristic models for describing human behavior and how to compare such models on various dimensions such as predictive power and transparency, as well as discussing interventions for improving human behavior. This book will be particularly valuable to academics and practitioners who seek to select a modeling approach that suits the operational decision at hand.

This handbook includes an overview of those areas of cognition and language processing that are relevant to the field of communication disorders, and provides examples of theoretical approaches to problems and issues in communication disorders. The first section includes a collection of chapters that outline some of the basic considerations and areas of cognition and language that underlie communication processing; a second section explains and exemplifies some of the influential theories of psycholinguistic/cognitive processing; and the third section illustrates theoretical applications to clinical populations. There is coverage of theories that have been either seminal or controversial in the research of communication disorders. Given the increasing multi-cultural workload of many practitioners working with clinical populations, chapters relating to bilingual populations are also included. The volume book provides a single interdisciplinary source where researchers and students can access information on psycholinguistic and cognitive processing theories relevant to clinical populations. A range of theories, models, and perspectives are provided. The range of topics and issues illustrate the relevance of a dynamic interaction between theoretical and applied work, and retains the complexity of psycholinguistic and cognitive theory for readers (both researchers and graduate students) whose primary interest is the field of communication disorders.

The thirty-two contributions discuss evidence from psychological experiments with healthy and brain-damaged subjects, functional imaging, electrophysiology, and computational modeling.

Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation—its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory—"in the wild." Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system. Introducing Navy life and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation (adopting David Marr's paradigm)—to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that are larger than an individual. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition, pointing to the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations. A Bradford Book

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute, La-Baume-les-Aix (Aix-en-Provence), France, June 27-July 7, 1985

Originally published in 1978 Volume 5 of this Handbook reflects a single theoretical orientation, that characterized by the term human information processing in the literature at the time, but which ranges over a very broad spectrum of cognitive activities. The first two chapters give some overall picture of the background, goals, method, and limitations of the information-processing approach. The remaining chapters treat in detail some principal areas of application – visual processing, mental chronometry, representation of spatial information in memory, problem solving, and the theory of instruction. The first three volumes of the Handbook presented an overview of the field, followed by treatments of conditioning, behavior theory, and human learning and retention. With the fourth volume, the focus of attention shifted from the domain of learning theory to that of cognitive psychology.

Neuropsychology has presented a particularly formidable array of devel opments during recent years. The number of methods, theoretical ap proaches, and publications has been steadily increasing, permitting a step-by-step approach to a deeper understanding of the tremendously complex relationships existing between brain and behavior. This volume was planned as a collection of papers that, in one way or another, present new research and clinical perspectives or interpretations about brain-behavior relationships. Some chapters present new research in specific topics, others summarize the evidence for a particular the oretical position, and others simply review the area and suggest new perspectives of research. Consistent with the spirit in which the book was planned, the authors present and propose new avenues for developing neuropsychology and understanding the organization of cognitive activity. Part I is devoted to basic theoretical and technical approaches in studying brain organization of cognitive processes. Hanlon and Brown ("Microgenesis: Historical Review and Current Studies") present an over view of some clinical and experimental work from the standpoint of mi crogenetic theory. Microgenesis is considered to be the structural devel opment of a cognition through qualitatively different stages. The authors discuss the growing dissatisfaction with both the old center and pathway theories and the newer modular or componental accounts. They also ex plore how micro genesis can be extended to the interpretation of symp toms of brain damage in developing a structural model of hierarchic levels through which the process of cognitive function unfolds.