This volume of collected papers, with the accompanying essays by the editors, is the definitive source book for the work of this important experimental psychologist. Originally published in 1991, it offered previously inaccessible essays by Albert Michotte on phenomenal causality, phenomenal permanence, phenomenal reality, and perception and cognition. Within these four sections are the most significant and representative of the Belgian psychologist's research in the area of experimental phenomenology. Extremely insightful introductions by the editors are included that place the essays (...) in context. Michotte's ideas have played an important role in much research on the development of perception, and his work on social perception continues to be influential in social psychology. The book also includes some lesser-known aspects of his work that are equally important; for example, a remarkable set of articles on pictorial analysis. (shrink)

First published in 1999, this book brings together the extensive modern evidence for innate imitation in babies. Modern research has shown imitation to be a natural mechanism of learning and communication which deserves to be at centre stage in developmental psychology. Yet the very possibility of imitation in newborn humans has had a controversial history. Defining imitation has proved to be far from straightforward and scientific evidence for its existence in neonates is only now becoming accepted, despite more than a (...) century of enquiry. In this book, some of the world's foremost researchers on imitation and intellectual development review evidence for imitation in newborn babies. They discuss the development of imitation in infancy, in both normal and atypical populations and in comparison with other primate species, stressing the fundamental importance of imitation in human development, as a foundation of communication and a precursor to symbolic processes. (shrink)

Galen Strawson considers the self to be best described as a cognitive, `distinctively mental' phenomenon. He asserts that the mental sense of self comes to every normal human being in childhood and comprises the sense of being a mental presence, of being alone in one's head, with the body `just a vehicle or vessel for the mental thing that is what one really or most essentially is' . His thesis is determinedly cognitivist and it is with this that I take (...) issue. As Reed puts the problem, `cognitivism, with its allegiance to the representational theory of mind and its focus on mental states as internal to the mind, is particularly susceptible to the dualistic separation of self from the environment' . One may add that cognitivism is also susceptible to separating the self from the body. Reed suggests that perception not only provides information for the distinction between self and environment from the outset, but also it provides a means of keeping in contact with the world. Memory provides a means of bridging earlier and later aspects of self and integrating diverse elements of experience. Both perceiving and remembering entail aspects of self but in rather different ways. Perceiving is a spatio-temporal process which provides a continuous flow of information about the embodied self in its encounters with the physical and social world. Autobiographical memory requires a duplication of the self so that `me-experiencing-now' can be related with `a prior me-experiencing-a-prior-environment'. The question of interest is how a perceived self may, through development, give rise to a remembered self. (shrink)