The book does not address speculations about the neurophysiological/brain bases of consciousness, arguing that these are premature, and it is highly critical of ...

I start with a review of 20 years of proposals on the functions of consciousness. I then present a minimal number of functions that consciouness subserves, as well as as some remaining puzzles about its psychology. In the process I stress a psychologist's functional approach, asking what consciousness is for. The result is an attempt to place conscious processes within the usual flow of human information processing.

Identical twins have attracted special attention for the study of behavior genetics. Some of the assumptions and results of these studies are reviewed with special attention given to the natural experiment of identical twins adopted by different families. However, the correlation for any behavior between the adopted twins of a monozygotic pair is affected by their common prenatal environment as well as by the pervasive similarity of the two adoptive environments. The genetic contribution to complex social phenomena, but also to (...) physical characteristics such as height, is usually overestimated. Both for adopted and unadopted twins differential effects of cultural, family, and prenatal environments, and the correlated experiences of twins and their physical appearance affect their development. Taxonomies and samples of environments need to be examined in order to be able to estimate the genetic contributions to behavioral traits. (shrink)

Experimental psychology in the early 20th century was targeted by several authors who described a crisis— often expressed as a lack of theoretical and experimental progress. In the 21st century, the crisis of competing theories has been largely overcome but several current emphases hinder the development of a mature experimental science. Central among these are an ethnocentrism that focuses on Western standards and populations, neuroscientism which often treats neurological evidence independently of mental and behavioral events, and the tendency for demonstration (...) experiments to replace coordinated theoretical approaches. (shrink)

Wegner's refutation of the notion of a conscious free will is addressed to a general reader. Despite a wide ranging and instructive survey and a conclusion acceptable to current psychological thinking, it is flawed by terminological confusions and lack of attention to relevant evidence and previous psychological approaches. It is suggested that psychology best drop the term will altogether.

The notion that human associative learning is a usually conscious, higher-order process is one of the tenets of organization theory, developed over the past century. Propositional/sequential encoding is one of the possible types of organizational structures, but learning may also involve other structures.

This volume contains contributions from friends and colleagues who have been influenced in one way or another by this accomplished psychologist.

A theory of how concept formation begins is presented that accounts for conceptual activity in the first year of life, shows how increasing conceptual complexity comes about, and predicts the order in which new types of information accrue to the conceptual system. In a compromise between nativist and empiricist views, it offers a single domain-general mechanism that redescribes attended spatiotemporal information into an iconic form. The outputs of this mechanism consist of types of spatial information that we know infants attend (...) to in the first months of life. These primitives form the initial basis of concept formation, allow explicit preverbal thought, such as recall, inferences, and simple mental problem solving, and support early language learning. The theory details how spatial concepts become associated with bodily feelings of force and trying. It also explains why concepts of emotions, sensory concepts such as color, and theory of mind concepts are necessarily later acquisitions because they lack contact with spatial descriptions to interpret unstructured internal experiences. Finally, commonalities between the concepts of preverbal infants and nonhuman primates are discussed. (shrink)

This book offers a theory of how human conceptual life begins, and shows how perceptual information becomes transformed into concepts. Drawing on extensive research, Mandler describes the development of preverbal concept formation, inductive inference, and recall, and explains how these processes form the conceptual basis for language and adult thought.

Idealist philosopher Georg Hegel defied the traditional epistemological distinction of objective from subjective and developed his own dialectical alternative. Remarkable for its breadth and profundity, this work combines aspects of psychology, logic, moral philosophy, and history to form a comprehensive view that encompasses all forms of civilization. Its three divisions consist of the subjective mind (dealing with anthropology and psychology), the objective mind (concerning philosophical issues of law and morals), and the absolute mind (covering fine arts, religion, and philosophy). Wide-ranging (...) in its influence, this survey of the evolution of consciousness is essential reading for all students of philosophy and history. (shrink)

The topic of a priori knowledge is approached through the theory of evidence. A shortcoming in traditional formulations of moderate rationalism and moderate empiricism is that they fail to explain why rational intuition and phenomenal experience count as basic sources of evidence. This explanatory gap is filled by modal reliabilism -- the theory that there is a qualified modal tie between basic sources of evidence and the truth. This tie to the truth is then explained by the theory of concept (...) possession: this tie is a consequence of what, by definition, it is to possess (i.e., to understand) one’s concepts. A corollary of the overall account is that the a priori disciplines (logic, mathematics, philosophy) can be largely autonomous from the empirical sciences. (shrink)