In Composition and Cognition, renowned composer and theorist Fred Lerdahl builds on his careerlong work of developing a comprehensive model of music cognition. Bringing together his dual expertise in composition and music theory, he reveals the way in which his research has served as a foundation for his compositional style and how his intuitions as a composer have guided his cognitively oriented theories. At times personal and reflective, this book offers an overall picture of the musical mind that has implications for central issues in contemporary composition, including the recurrent gap between method and result, and the tension between cognitive constraints and utopian aesthetic views of musical progress. Lerdahl’s succinct volume provides invaluable insights for students and instructors, composers and music scholars, and anyone engaged with contemporary music.

For the creative fulfillment of writers who identify as runners, walkers, or movers, Running, Thinking, Writing: Embodied Cognition in Composition unveils the varied understandings of the relationship between writing activity and physical activity. Jackie Hoermann-Elliott provides an interdisciplinary overview of relevant research from the fields of composition studies, cognitive science, neuroscience, and sports psychology before proposing a new theoretical framework for explaining what happens to writers when they are moved to develop their writing while their bodies are in motion. She shares illuminating accounts from runner-writers working in the industries of journalism, academia, and youth literature. She also provides pedagogical insights from working with student writers on embodied writing assignments as well as introductory activities for instructors to try in their own classrooms. With a running metaphor guiding the chapters in this book, readers will be challenged to view writing as embodied cognition and to realize the benefits of embodiment for all writers.

Embodiment of Musical Creativity offers an innovative look at the interdisciplinary nature of creativity in musical composition. Using examples from empirical and theoretical research in creativity studies, music theory and cognition, psychology and philosophy, performance and education studies, and the author’s own creative practice, the book examines how the reciprocity of cognition and performativity contributes to our understanding of musical creativity in composition. From the composer’s perspective the book investigates the psychological attributes of creative cognition whose associations become the foundation for an understanding of embodied creativity in musical composition. The book defines the embodiment of musical creativity as a cognitive and performative causality: a relationship between the cause and effect of our experience when composing music. Considering the theoretical, practical, contextual, and pedagogical implications of embodied creative experience, the book redefines aspects of musical composition to reflect the changing ways that musical creativity is understood and evaluated. Embodiment of Musical Creativity provides a comparative study of musical composition, in turn articulating a new perspective on musical creativity.

Pedagogical Perspectives on Cognition and Writing addresses a scholarly audience in writing studies, specifically scholars and teachers of writing, writing program administrators, and writing center scholars and administrators. Chapters focus on the place of cognition in threshold concepts, teaching for transfer, rhetorical theory, trauma theory, genre, writing centers, community writing, and applications of the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. The 1980s witnessed a growing interest in writing studies on cognitive approaches to studying and teaching college-level writing. While some would argue this interest was simply of a moment, we argue that cognitive theories still have great influence in writing studies and have substantial potential to continue reinvigorating what we know about writing and writers. By grounding this collection in ongoing interest in writing-related transfer, the role of metacognition in supporting successful transfer, and the habits of mind within the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, Pedagogical Perspectives on Cognition and Writing highlights the robust but also problematic potential cognitive theories of writing hold for how we research writing, how we teach and tutor writers, and how we work with community writers. Pedagogical Perspectives on Cognition and Writing includes a foreword by Susan Miller-Cochran and an afterword by Asao Inoue. Additional contributors include Melvin E. Beavers, Subrina Bogan, Harold Brown, Christine Cucciarre, Barbara J. D’Angelo, Gita DasBender, Tonya Eick, Gregg Fields, Morgan Gross, Jessica Harnisch, David Hyman, Caleb James, Peter H. Khost, William J. Macauley, Jr., Heather MacDonald, Barry M. Maid, Courtney Patrick-Weber, Patricia Portanova, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, J. Michael Rifenburg, Duane Roen, Airlie Rose, Wendy Ryden, Thomas Skeen, Michelle Stuckey, Sean Tingle, James Toweill, Martha A. Townsend, Kelsie Walker, and Bronwyn T. Williams.

Explores the historical context of cognitive studies, the importance to our field of studies in neuroscience, the applicability of habits of mind, and the role of cognition in literate development and transfer.

The study of musical composition has, in the main, been informed by anecdotal after-the-event accounts or post hoc analyses of composition. This book presents the first coherent exploration around this unique aspect of human creative activity. The central threads, or key themes - compositional process, creative thinking and problem-solving - are integrated by the combination of theoretical understandings of creativity with innovative empirical work.

What do infants know? How does the knowledge that they begin with prepare them for learning about the particular physical, cultural, and social world in which they live? Answers to this question shed light not only on infants but on children and adults in all cultures, because the core knowledge possessed by infants never goes away. Instead, it underlies the unspoken, common sense knowledge of people of all ages, in all societies. By studying babies, researchers gain insights into infants themselves, into older children's prodigious capacities for learning, and into some of the unconscious assumptions that guide our thoughts and actions as adults. In this major new work, Elizabeth Spelke shares these insights by distilling the findings from research in developmental, comparative, and cognitive psychology, with excursions into studies of animal cognition in psychology and in systems and cognitive neuroscience, and studies in the computational cognitive sciences. Weaving across these disciplines, she paints a picture of what young infants know, and what they quickly come to learn, about objects, places, numbers, geometry, and people's actions, social engagements, and mental states. A landmark publication in the developmental literature, the book will be essential for students and researchers across the behavioral, brain, and cognitive sciences.