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Language acquisition has often been approached as an isolated domain subject to its own laws and driven by its own mechanisms. The working hypothesis of this book is that language acquisition is simply learning, subject to the same laws as learning in other domains, and well-described by models of associative learning. ‘Changing minds changing tools’ connects findings in language acquisition to comparable findings elsewhere, including research on error-driven predictive learning, Hebbian learning, chunking, category learning, and learned selective attention. In the process, ‘Changing minds changing tools’ provides a domain-general associationist framework for some of the central issues in language acquisition, from phonetics to phonology to morphology to the lexicon / constructicon. This perspective is argued to provide plausible explanations for several recurrent pathways of language change. From sound change to changes in construction productivity to grammaticalization, languages change in predictable ways. Some directions of change are frequent while others are rare or unattested. Following the usage-based approach to linguistics, ‘Changing minds changing tools’ argues that explaining these “diachronic universals” is the most promising way to approach the central question of linguistic theory, “why languages are the way they are.” Synchronically, languages are incredibly diverse but they change in predictable ways. Once applied to the task of language acquisition, domain-general learning mechanisms provide ready explanations for many diachronic universals. Therefore, approaching language acquisition should bring the field closer to its ultimate goal of explaining both what languages share and the ways in which they vary.

It is generally acknowledged that attachment relationships are important for infants and young children, but there is little clarity on what exactly constitutes such a relationship. Does it occur between two individuals (infant–mother or infant–father) or in an extended network? In the West, monotropic attachment appears to function as a secure foundation for infants, but is this true in other cultures? This volume offers perspectives from a range of disciplines on these questions. Contributors from psychology, biology, anthropology, evolution, social policy, neuroscience, information systems, and practice describe the latest research on the cultural and evolutionary foundations on children’s attachment relationships as well as the implications for education, counseling, and policy. The contributors discuss such issues as the possible functions of attachment, including trust and biopsychological regulation; the evolutionary foundations, if any, of attachment; ways to model attachment using the tools of information science; the neural foundations of attachment; and the influence of cultural attitudes on attachment. Taking an integrative approach, the book embraces the wide cultural variations in attachment relationships in humans and their diversity across nonhuman primates. It proposes research methods for the culturally sensitive study of attachment networks that will lead to culturally sensitive assessments, practices, and social policies.

It is now widely accepted that many organisms (including humans) don’t just react to the world using behavioral reflexes, but also, at times, decide what to do by relying on mental representations. More specifically, the behavior of many organisms is not simply triggered by a perception of the state of their environment, but inferred using higher-level mental states downstream from their perceptual states. What is far less clear is why this is the case: what benefits does representational decision making bring to an organism, and what implications do these benefits have for the exact role that mental representations play in an organism’s decision making machinery? In my book, I provide answers to these questions. Specifically, I defend a cognitive-efficiency-based account of the evolution of mental representations, according to which a key driver of the evolution of representational decision making is the fact that mental representations can enable an organism to save a number of cognitive resources and to adjust more easily to changed environments. I then apply this account to a number of open questions in different sciences, including: when should we expect cognition to essentially involve parts of the environment? When should we expect decision making to rely on simple, satisficing heuristics? When should we expect organisms to be altruistically motivated to help others? Along the way, I also respond to concerns about the plausibility of evolutionary psychological projects more generally.

This book explores the cognitive science of effortless attention and action. Attention and action are generally understood to require effort, and it is expected that under normal circumstances, effort increases to meet rising demand. Sometimes, however, attention and action seem to flow effortlessly despite high demand. Effortless attention and action have been documented across a range of normal activities—ranging from rock climbing to chess playing—and yet fundamental questions about effortlessness have gone largely unasked. This book draws from the field of cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, behavioral psychology, genetics, philosophy, and cross-cultural studies to address those questions. Starting from the premise that the phenomena of effortless attention and action provide an opportunity to test current models of attention and action, researchers—including effort as a cognitive resource—clarify topics such as the role of effort in decision-making, the neurophysiology of effortless attention and action, the role of automaticity in effortless action, expert performance in effortless action, and the neurophysiology and benefits of attentional training.

This classic book, first published in 1991, was one of the first to propose the “embodied cognition” approach in cognitive science. It pioneered the connections between phenomenology and science and between Buddhist practices and science—claims that have since become highly influential. Through this cross-fertilization of disparate fields of study, the book introduced a new form of cognitive science called “enaction,” in which both the environment and first person experience are aspects of embodiment. However, enactive embodiment is not the grasping of an independent, outside world by a brain, a mind, or a self; rather it is the bringing forth of an interdependent world in and through embodied action. Although enacted cognition lacks an absolute foundation, the book shows how that does not lead to either experiential or philosophical nihilism. Above all, the book's arguments were powered by the conviction that the sciences of mind must encompass lived human experience and the possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience. This revised edition includes introductions that clarify central arguments of the work and discuss and evaluate subsequent research that has expanded on the themes of the book, including the renewed theoretical and practical interest in Buddhism and mindfulness. A preface by the originator of the mindfulness-based stress-reduction program, contextualizes the book and describes its influence on his life and work.

Scientists were unable to study the relation of brain to mind until the invention of technologies that measured the brain activity accompanying psychological processes. Yet even with these new tools, conclusions are tentative or simply wrong. This book describes five conditions that place serious constraints on the ability to predict mental or behavioral outcomes based on brain data: the setting in which evidence is gathered, the expectations of the subject, the source of the evidence that supports the conclusion, the absence of studies that examine patterns of causes with patterns of measures, and the habit of borrowing terms from psychology. The book describes the importance of context, and how the experimental setting—including the room, the procedure, and the species, age, and sex of both subject and examiner—can influence the conclusions. It explains how subject expectations affect all brain measures; considers why brain and psychological data often yield different conclusions; argues for relations between patterns of causes and outcomes rather than correlating single variables; and criticizes the borrowing of psychological terms to describe brain evidence. Brain sites cannot be in a state of “fear.” A deeper understanding of the brain's contributions to behavior, the book argues, requires investigators to acknowledge these five constraints in the design or interpretation of an experiment.

Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. The first edition of this book proposed an innovative and provocative answer: the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain; it helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, the book says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion (“the most compelling illusion”), it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. This new edition includes a foreword and an introduction. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, the book examines cases both when people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing and when they are not willing an act that they in fact are doing in such phenomena as hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, and dissociative identity disorder. The author's argument was immediately controversial (called “unwarranted impertinence” by one scholar) but also compelling, and the book has been called the author's magnum opus.

Although our physical abilities clearly decline as we age, cognitive decline in healthy old age is neither universal nor inevitable. This book shows that scientific research does not support the popular notion of the inexorable and progressive effects of cognitive aging in all older adults. It reports that many adults maintain a high level of cognitive function into old age and that certain experiential and lifestyle factors—including education, exercise, diet, and opportunities for new learning—contribute to the preservation of cognitive abilities. Many popular accounts draw similar conclusions and give similar lifestyle advice but lack supporting scientific evidence. This book reviews research on cognitive and brain aging. It shows that even the aged brain remains capable of plasticity—the ability to adapt to and benefit from experience—and it summarizes evidence that brain plasticity is heightened by certain types of cognitive training, by aerobic exercise, and by certain diets. The book also reports on the somewhat controversial use of estrogen and cognition-enhancing drugs, on environmental adaptations (including ‘virtual assistants’) that help older adults ‘age in place,’ and on genetic factors in cognitive aging. The past twenty years of research points to ways that older adults can lead rich and cognitively vital lives.

All languages have exceptions alongside overarching rules and regularities. How does a young child tease them apart within just a few years of language acquisition? Drawing an economic analogy, Yang argues that just as the price of goods is determined by the balance between supply and demand, the price of linguistic productivity arises from the quantitative considerations of rules and exceptions. The learner postulates a productive rule only if it results in a more efficient organization of language, with the number of exception falling below a critical threshold. Supported by a wide range of cases with corpus evidence, the Tolerance Principle gives a unified account of many long-standing puzzles in linguistics and psychology, including why children effortlessly acquire linguistic rules that perplex otherwise capable adults. The focus on computational efficiency provides novel insight on how language interacts with the other components of cognition, and how the ability for language might have emerged during the course of human evolution.

In a post-truth, fake news world, we are particularly susceptible to the claims of pseudoscience. When emotions and opinions are more widely disseminated than scientific findings, and self-proclaimed experts get their expertise from Google, how can the average person distinguish real science from fake? This book examines pseudoscience from a variety of perspectives, through case studies, analysis, and personal accounts that show how to recognize pseudoscience, why it is so widely accepted, and how to advocate for real science. Contributors examine the basics of pseudoscience, including issues of cognitive bias; the costs of pseudoscience, with accounts of naturopathy and logical fallacies in the anti-vaccination movement; perceptions of scientific soundness; the mainstream presence of “integrative medicine,” hypnosis, and parapsychology; and the use of case studies and new media in science advocacy.

This book shows that rational thinking, like intelligence, is a measurable cognitive competence. Drawing on theoretical work and empirical research from the last two decades, The Rationality Quotient presents the first prototype for an assessment of rational thinking analogous to an IQ test: the CART (Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking). The book describes the theoretical underpinnings of the CART, distinguishing the algorithmic mind from the reflective mind. It discusses the logic of the tasks used to measure cognitive biases. The book presents a unique typology of thinking errors. The Rationality Quotient explains the components of rational thought assessed by the CART, including probabilistic and scientific reasoning; the avoidance of “miserly” information processing; and the knowledge structures needed for rational thinking. The book discusses studies of the CART and the social and practical implications of such a test. An appendix offers sample items from the test.

Mind vs Body? We traditionally attribute our mental features like consciousness to either mind or body – this amounts to the question for the relationship between mind or body, the mind-body problem. Various answers have been suggested to the mind-body problem in both philosophy and neuroscience. The neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher Georg Northoff takes a fundamentally different approach though. Instead of providing yet another answer, he questions the question itself. Do we really have to attribute mental features like consciousness to either mind or brain? Investigating both empirical data in neuroscience and ontological issues in philosophy, he comes to an amazing conclusion: we can replace mind including mind-body relation by investigating the relation of our brain to the world, the “world-brain relation”. This renders the mind-body problem simply superfluous. Instead, we are better off, on both empirical and ontological grounds, by addressing mental features like consciousness in terms of the relationship between world and brain, the “world-brain problem”, as he says. That is possible though only if we radically change our viewpoint on both brain and world – this amounts to nothing less than a true Copernican revolution in neuroscience and philosophy.

This book presents an innovative new approach to the study of wellbeing, intersecting psychology, linguistics, and cross-cultural scholarship. It begins by introducing a cartographic theory of language, proposing that words enable us to map our world, and thus to understand and navigate our lives. However, different cultures map the world in different ways, generating so-called untranslatable words (i.e., which lack an equivalent in another language – in this case, English). Their significance is that they point to aspects of life that have hitherto been overlooked or undervalued in English-speaking cultures. By exploring such words, we can therefore refine our maps, developing a more nuanced appreciation of the world. This book deploys this process with respect to wellbeing specifically, bringing its hidden dimensions to light. Moreover, it argues that this process may not only enhance our understanding of wellbeing, but also our experience of it, empowering us to identify phenomena that had previously been only dimly perceived, and even to discover new dimensions of existence we had not realised were there. These possibilities are brought to life through a tour of 400 or so words, sourced from nearly 80 languages. These terms are analysed thematically, arranged into three overarching meta-categories – feelings, relationships, and personal development – which together constitute a comprehensive new theory of wellbeing. The book concludes by outlining an ambitious research agenda that will fully allow the promise of these untranslatable words, and the theory outlined here, to be realised.

The image of the addict in popular culture combines victimhood and moral failure; we sympathize with addicts in films and novels because of their suffering and their hard-won knowledge. And yet actual scientific knowledge about addiction tends to undermine this cultural construct. In this book, addiction researchers from neuroscience, psychology, genetics, philosophy, economics, and other fields survey findings in addiction science. They discuss such questions as whether addiction is one kind of condition, or several; if it is neurophysiological, psychological, social, or incorporates aspects of all of these; to what extent addicts are responsible for their problems, and how this affects health and regulatory policies; and whether addiction is determined by inheritance or environment, or both. The contributors discuss the possibility of a unifying basis for different addictions (considering both substance addiction and pathological gambling), offering both neurally and neuroscientifically grounded accounts, as well as discussions of the social context of addiction.