Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity and Dual-Process Theories of the Mind.

Dual-process theories of the mind are ubiquitous in psychology. A central principle of these theories is that behavior is determined by the interplay of automatic and controlled processing. In this article, the authors examine individual differences in the capacity to control attention as a major contributor to differences in working memory capacity (WMC). The authors discuss the enormous implications of this individual difference for a host of dual-process theories in social, personality, cognitive, and clinical psychology. In addition, the authors propose several new areas of investigation that derive directly from applying the concept of WMC to dual-process theories of the mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Communicating in Jargon.

Recently, psychologists from the Human Factors Section at the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics wrote a paper with some electrical engineering implications and asked members of the Analog Computer Section for comment. The engineers were perplexed (and amused) by numerous terms in the paper. This article presents some of the group's best efforts at defining the terms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Le premier vocabulaire de sciences cognitives en langue fran?aise.

Reviews the book, Vocabulaire de sciences cognitives by O. Houdé, D. Kayser, O. Koenig, J. Proust, and F. Rastier (1998). The Vocabulaire de sciences cognitives contains 130 alphabetically ordered entries, each entry corresponding to a different word or expression used in cognitive science. The entries are treated from the point of view of each of the five main disciplines contributing to cognitive science: artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. The texts concerning a given entry form distinct sections labeled with the name of the discipline concerned. Numerous cross-references to related entries are given. Overall, the Vocabulaire contains about 200 different texts, a third of which have been authored by the members of the editorial board, each of whom is specialized in one of the disciplines mentioned; the remaining texts were written by 54 other authors from these various fields. Of the 130 entries, only 2 very pivotal terms in cognitive science (FUNCTION and REPRESENTATION) receive complete multidisciplinary treatment; 15 entries referring mostly to major cognitive functions (e.g., LANGUAGE, LEARNING, MEMORY, PERCEPTION, REASONING) are covered by three or four disciplines, and 31 others receive a bidisciplinary treatment. Analysis of the 144 pairs of disciplines found in these 48 entries shows the neighborhood among disciplines to be fairly evenly distributed except in the case of psychology and neuroscience, whose greater conceptual proximity is explained by the fact that most neuroscience texts have been written by neuropsychologists. The contributions of the various disciplines were reviewed by one specialist and by at least one nonspecialist. Although predictably more critical, the specialists did not identify many serious problems or errors. However, the reviewers expressed some reservations concerning the choice of the terms deemed worth of an entry, the limited number of disciplines contributing to some entries, the variable length and nature of the texts, as well as the exaggerated place sometimes given to secondary research. If the Vocabulaire de sciences cognitives does not constitute a monumental achievement, it is nonetheless an impressive piece of work, especially considering the breadth and state of the domain. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of APA dictionary of psychology.

Reviews the book, APA dictionary of psychology by Gary R. VandenBos (see record 2006-11044-000). This book is an impressive comprehensive reference book that includes germane entries of overlapping and interrelated disciplines. This dictionary is a useful resource not only for professionals who work in the field of psychology, but also for the professionals who work in related and/or overlapping disciplines (e.g., social workers, psychiatrists, practitioners, lawyers). The long list of editors and contributors shows that the making of this book was a major joint effort. The hard-covered book has 1,023 pages and more than 25,000 entries that are accompanied by thousands of cross-references. The dictionary provides a brief history of the book's development and a brief guide to its layout and format. The book has high-quality paper, a double-column layout, large boldface headwords, and small boldface subentries, all of which make it easy to read. In addition, each entry is generously indented under the headword making the pages appear less crowded when compared to other dictionaries. The size of the book is very reasonable, which will be appealing to the reader. Overall, this high-quality dictionary is a very useful resource for professionals and students in the field of psychology, as well as for professionals in related disciplines. Regardless of whether the reader is a professional or novice, he or she will no doubt appreciate this comprehensive "user friendly" dictionary. The wait for a psychology reference book was worth it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Death Anxiety and the Emotion-Processing Mind.

Death anxiety, a critical influence on human life and its psychotherapies, has been relatively neglected by psychoanalytic writers. The author proposes several reasons for this oversight and introduces the communicative or strong adaptive approach to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, which has recently begun to explore this issue. The features of the approach are described, with emphasis on a revised version of Freud's topographic model of the mind. Three forms of death anxiety are postulated: existential, predatory, and predator. The author explores the effects of each form on emotional adaptations and the psychotherapy experience, and their role in the evolution of the emotion-processing mind-the postulated mental module with which people adapt to emotionally charged events and their meanings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An Integrated Theory of the Mind.

Adaptive control of thought-rational (ACT-R; J. R. Anderson & C. Lebiere, 1998) has evolved into a theory that consists of multiple modules but also explains how these modules are integrated to produce coherent cognition. The perceptual-motor modules, the goal module, and the declarative memory module are presented as examples of specialized systems in ACT-R. These modules are associated with distinct cortical regions. These modules place chunks in buffers where they can be detected by a production system that responds to patterns of information in the buffers. At any point in time, a single production rule is selected to respond to the current pattern. Subsymbolic processes serve to guide the selection of rules to fire as well as the internal operations of some modules. Much of learning involves tuning of these subsymbolic processes. A number of simple and complex empirical examples are described to illustrate how these modules function singly and in concert. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The psychology of science and the origins of the scientific mind.

Reviews the book, The psychology of science and the origins of the scientific mind by Gregory Feist (see record 2006-02942-000). In this book, Gregory Feist sets out to show two things: that psychology of science can be its own field and that this field has been growing along side of humanity ever since its inception. Feist divides the book into two parts. First, he argues for the legitimacy of the field of psychology of science, addressing relevant research from many sub fields and their applications for the future. Part two delves into the origins and future of the scientific mind. Overall, this book makes one logically consider what science is and is not. It brings about contemplation about how science developed and how humans embraced it. Feist says he wants to take on the applied implications for the formalized study of both the psychology and science and the properties of the scientific mind. His goal is to move the psychology of science from its implicit methods scattered across domains of psychology and make them explicit. He wants to unite researchers scattered across the world to make up a new psychology of science that actively meets, has its own journal, and can educate future researchers. This is all very interesting and indeed possible, as long as the meetings would follow the same integrative genius that is displayed in this book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of How the mind works.

Reviews the book, How the mind works by Steven Pinker (see record 1997-30233-000). In this book, the author writes with optimism and excitement about recent progress in psychology, but with despair about the human condition. The scope of the book is stated briefly: "I will try to explain what the mind is, where it came from, and how it lets us see, think, feel, interact, and pursue higher callings like art, religion, and philosophy" (p. 3). The reader will be disappointed in many of these explanations: the book dwells on the already-expansive topics of what the mind is, and where it came from. As for the rest, we are told that humans have innate knowledge of optics, logic, mathematics, physics, botany (p. 377), and even psychology (p. 329). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Colorless Color Controversy.

The present author notes that confusions and contradictions concerning color terminology to be found in elementary psychology texts have been amply documented by Karl Pratt ("Colorless colors?" American Psychologist, 1962, 17, 660-662). Psychologists are not alone, however. The fields of colorimetry and photometry have helped to foster such an inconsistent nomenclature. He suggests adopting terminology put forth by The Committee on Colorimetry, Optical Society of America (1953) in their book, "The Science of Color". (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Studies of How the Mind Publicly Enfolds into Being.

Review of book Studies of How the Mind Publicly Enfolds into Being edited by William E. Smythe and Angelina Baydala. This volume contains the fruits of a symposium of the Western Canadian Theoretical Psychologists devoted to the topic contained in the title, though the original idea was expressed by considering "psyche and polis" (p. viii), the two Greek terms from which our conceptions of self and public largely derive. Most of the reflection does not return all the way to ancient Greece, but the essays draw deeply on historical sources, retracing the influences of contemporary thought and reminding the audience of some roads not taken. The issue and definition of self are the predominant theme. Judging from the references, the sources of inspiration for many of these essays is predominantly philosophical, with liberal borrowings from sociology, cultural studies, and political theory. Despite the complexity and range of theoretical issues discussed, the contributions are uniformly clear and engaging, a credit to authors and editors alike. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aristotle, teleology, and modern psychology.

After first discussing the symbiotic relationship between science and philosophy of science in mind, the author then presents a very selective glimpse of the path that science traversed from Aristotle and the ancients to the modern science of psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of La psychologie de A à Z: 500 mots pour comprendre.

Reviews the book, La psychologie de A à Z: 500 mots pour comprendre by Camilo Charron, Nathalie Dumet, Nicolas Guéguen, Alain Lieury, and Stéphane Rusinek (2007). Summarizing a discipline as broad as psychology in 500 words, that is the challenge that the five authors of Psychology from A to Z took up. In itself, establishing a list of the 500 most important concepts or words in psychology is likely to give rise to vigorous debate. Moreover, there is also the constraint to describe each concept in a few lines only. To further increase the challenge, the book presents itself as a dictionary whose reading will not be linear: each definition must therefore be independent while avoiding the repetition from one entry to another. Read more about this book review in the full text pdf. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of A history of modern psychology: Third edition.

Reviews the book, A history of modern psychology: Third edition by C. James Goodwin (see record 2008-14615-000). This text is an excellent introduction to the history of Western psychology, in terms of both tracing the discipline’s lineage through milestone events and in demonstrating how historians approach the subject. As the primary goal of the book is to attract the interest of students who perhaps are only taking a course in the history of psychology because it is required of them, the major strength of this text is its readability. The author’s ability to render complicated material comprehensible for introductory level students and laymen, as well as the affable tone used throughout the work makes it suitable for any reader interested in the foundations of the discipline. Its success is in the framework it provides, which graduate or even undergraduate level instructors can flesh out with supplementary readings and in-class discussion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The Development of Modern Behavioural Psychology.

Reviews the book, The Development of Modern Behavioural Psychology by John McLeish (1981). The title of McLeish's book contains two terms that may be somewhat misleading. Describing his efforts as encompassing the "Development" of ideas suggests that the approach is historical, while the term "Modern Behavioural Psychology" might be taken to mean almost anything depending upon one's restrictive use of the term. McLeish, as it turns out, attaches a very restrictive meaning to "Behavioural Psychology". There will probably always be argument about what constitutes a proper historical approach but the reviewer doubts that the tact McLeish takes will ever satisfy. In his review of the history of radical behaviourism, McLeish highlights the work of some writers who have not been given a prominent place by other historians, and discusses, or notes only in passing, authors who have ordinarily been considered prominent. As a history, then, McLeish's book is a disappointment and often annoying. Perhaps the best that can be said about this book is that McLeish hints at a form of behavioural theory which would expand the present boundaries of our thinking. In his enthusiastic advocacy of an account that would recognize the historical, social and cultural origins of human behaviour as well as its complexity (including language, thinking and consciousness), McLeish points to the biological rather than the physical (or mathematical) sciences as the source of appropriate models to develop a science of behaviour. In this he is to be congratulated. It is too bad he did not devote the book to a full development of these notions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Naming the mind: How psychology found its language.

Reviews the book, Naming the mind: How psychology found its language by Kurt Danziger (see record 1997-97355-000). The language of our scientific beliefs and practices is like the air we breathe. We need to be reminded that it is there, doing things for us and to us. It constitutes what, we purport to study and thus ought to be as much the object of our investigations as the phenomena it describes. Yet like the air we breathe, our language is taken so for granted as to be all but invisible. It often takes a stroke of genius to make us conscious of it. There have been many books recently on psychological discourse, but none, in my view, as revealing as Naming the Mind. It should be required reading for all who wish to call themselves psychologists. We owe it to ourselves and to those we study to be fully aware of the social-historical relativity of our basic categories. This book offers an effective contribution toward this essential form of self-reflectiveness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive styles in the context of modern psychology: Toward an integrated framework of cognitive style.

The goals of this article are to elucidate trends and perspectives in the field of cognitive style research and to propose an integrated framework to guide future research. This is accomplished by means of a comprehensive literature review of the major advances and the theoretical and experimental problems that have accumulated over the years and by a discussion of the promising theoretical models that can be further developed, in part, with modern neuroscience techniques and with research from different psychological fields. On the basis of the research reviewed in this article, the author suggests that cognitive styles represent heuristics that individuals use to process information about their environment. These heuristics can be identified at multiple levels of information processing, from perceptual to metacognitive, and they can be grouped according to the type of regulatory function they exert on processes ranging from automatic data encoding to conscious executive allocation of cognitive resources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Theory of Mind and Motion Perception in Schizophrenia.

This study investigated the relationship between theory of mind (ToM) deficits and visual perception in patients with schizophrenia (N=52; 17 remitted and unmedicated) compared with healthy controls (N=30). ToM was assessed with the Eyes Test, which asked participants to choose which of 4 words best described the mental state of a person whose eyes were depicted in a photograph. Visual perception was evaluated with form and motion coherence threshold measurements. Results revealed that patients with schizophrenia (both remitted and nonremitted) showed deficits on the Eyes Test and the motion coherence task. ToM dysfunctions were associated with higher motion coherence thresholds and more severe negative symptoms. This suggests that ToM deficits are related to motion perception dysfunctions, which indicates a possible role of motion-sensitive areas in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Cognitive psychology.

Reviews the book, Cognitive Psychology by Guy Claxton (1980). This is a bold attempt to provide a well-integrated review of the problems and prospects of modern cognitive psychology. In general, the book succeeds although one may disagree with the directions that are foreseen. The book consists of nine papers by eight authors. Six chapters plus an overview cover traditional topics within cognition while two excellent chapters extend the discussion to motor control and cross-cultural perspectives. Together the chapters are '... meant to be a guidebook to organizing one's thoughts, and a life-raft to cling on to when in danger of drowning in the sea of detail'. This is an excellent overview for graduate students or scientists in related fields; it will prove difficult for all but the brighter undergraduates. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Statistical Significance or Statistical Stability--An Improved Terminology.

In this comment the author explains that it is very hard for teachers of psychology to convey the distinction between statistical and concrete significance. He makes the claim that "statistical stability" may be a more suitable term for "statistical significance" because suitability points to the essential idea that the value in question will not change randomly. It thus has a more specific connotation than "significance". (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)