my mind on books

Following is a list of cognitive science books new/forthcoming in 2008, to be added to the list in the sidebar. This selection is based on a search of WorldCat, so they are titles that have been chosen by libraries. [6/13 – just updated a few titles that have since been released]

Applied Attention Theory by Christopher D Wickens and Jason S McCarley (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2008)

Applying Cognitive Science to Education: Thinking and Learning in Scientific and Other Complex Domains (Bradford Books) by F Reif (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT, 2008) forthcoming

Better Than Conscious?: Decision Making, the Human Mind, and Implications for Institutions ed. by Christoph Engel and Wolf Singer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008)

Beyond Happiness: Deepening the Dialogue Between Buddhism, Psychotherapy and the Mind Sciences by Gay Watson (London: Karnac Books, 2008)

The Bounds of Cognition by Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa (Malden, Mass.; Oxford : Blackwell Pub., 2008)

The Cambridge Handbook of Computational Psychology (Cambridge Handbook Of…)ed. by Ron Sun (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Cognitive Economics by Bernard Walliser (Berlin: Springer, 2008)

Cognitive Science (SAGE Benchmarks in Psychology Series) ed. by Koen Lamberts (Los Angeles; London: SAGE, 2008). 6 vols.

Cognitive Science Compendium ed. by Miao-Kun Sun (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2008) forthcoming

Cognitive Sciences Research Progress ed. by Miao-Kun Sun (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2008) forthcoming

Creative Model Construction in Scientists and Students: The Role of Imagery, Analogy, and Mental Simulation by John J Clement (Dordrecht; London: Springer, 2008) forthcoming

History of Cognitive Neuroscience by M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) forthcoming

Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science (Bradford Books) by Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008) forthcoming

I-Language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science by Daniela Isac and Charles Reiss (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2008) (textbook)

The Innate Mind: Vol. 3, Foundations and the Future (Evolution and Cognition)ed. by Peter Carruthers; Stephen Laurence; Stephen P Stich (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Midbrain Mutiny: The Picoeconomics and Neuroeconomics of Disordered Gambling: Economic Theory and Cognitive Science (Bradford Books) by Don Ross; et al (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008)

Mind and Cognition: An Anthology, 3rd ed. (Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies) ed. by William G Lycan and Jesse J Prinz (Malden, Mass.; Oxford: Blackwell Pub. Ltd, 2008)

Mind, Brain and the Elusive Soul: Human Systems of Cognitive Science and Religion by Mark Graves (Aldershot, England ; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2008)

Models of Brain and Mind: Physical, Computational and Psychological Approaches (Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 168) ed. by Rahul Banerjee; B K Chakrabarti (Amsterdam; London: Elsevier, 2008)

Neuroeconomics: A Guide to the New Science of Making Choices by Peter E Politser (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Novel Approaches in Cognitive Informatics and Natural Intelligence ed. by Yingxu Wang (Hershey, Pa. : Information Science Reference, 2009) forthcoming

The Probabilistic Mind: Prospects for Bayesian Cognitive Science by Nick Chater and M Oaksford (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative by Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) forthcoming

Truly Understood by Christopher Peacocke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

The new book The Probabilistic Mind: Prospects for Bayesian Cognitive Science by Nick Chater and Mike Oaksford (Oxford, 2008) [Search Inside the Book available at Amazon] appears to be unrelated to the New Scientist article on Bayesian statistics and brain functions discussed today at Mind Hacks.

From the product description for The Probabilistic Mind:

The rational analysis method, first proposed by John R. Anderson, has been enormously influential in helping us understand high-level cognitive processes.

The Probabilistic Mind is a follow-up to the influential and highly cited ‘Rational Models of Cognition’ (OUP, 1998). It brings together developments in understanding how, and how far, high-level cognitive processes can be understood in rational terms, and particularly using probabilistic Bayesian methods. It synthesizes and evaluates the progress in the past decade, taking into account developments in Bayesian statistics, statistical analysis of the cognitive ‘environment’ and a variety of theoretical and experimental lines of research. The scope of the book is broad, covering important recent work in reasoning, decision making, categorization, and memory. Including chapters from many of the leading figures in this field,
The Probabilistic Mind will be valuable for psychologists and philosophers interested in cognition.

Better Than Conscious?: Decision Making, the Human Mind, and Implications For Institutions (Strüngmann Forum Reports) ed. by Christoph Engel and Wolf Singer (MIT Press, 2008)

From the product description:

Conscious control enables human decision makers to override routines, to exercise willpower, to find innovative solutions, to learn by instruction, to decide collectively, and to justify their choices. These and many more advantages, however, come at a price: the ability to process information consciously is severely limited and conscious decision makers are liable to hundreds of biases. Measured against the norms of rational choice theory, conscious decision makers perform poorly. But if people forgo conscious control, in appropriate tasks, they perform surprisingly better: they handle vast amounts of information; they update prior information; they find appropriate solutions to ill-defined problems.

This inaugural Strüngmann Forum Report explores the human ability to make decisions, consciously as well as without conscious control. It explores decision-making strategies, including deliberate and intuitive; explicit and implicit; processing information serially and in parallel, with a general-purpose apparatus, or with task-specific neural subsystems. The analysis is at four levels–neural, psychological, evolutionary, and institutional–and the discussion is extended to the definition of social problems and the design of better institutional interventions. The results presented differ greatly from what could be expected under standard rational choice theory and deviate even more from the alternate behavioral view of institutions. New challenges emerge (for example, the issue of free will) and some purported social problems almost disappear if one adopts a more adequate model of human decision making.

Preprint of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (22 p. pdf by Engel and Singer)

Ernst Strüngmann Forum information

I was thinking of linking to books by the authors mentioned by David Brooks in his New York Times column “The Neural Buddhists,” but then I found out that Neuroanthropology has already done it —in “David Brooks Bonus.”

Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others by Marco Iacoboni (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). Amazon still has this listed as a pre-order, with a publication date of May 13, but I saw this book on the shelves at my local bookstore yesterday.

From the product description:

What accounts for the remarkable ability to get inside another person’s head—to know what they’re thinking and feeling? “Mind reading” is the very heart of what it means to be human, creating a bridge between self and others that is fundamental to the development of culture and society. But until recently, scientists didn’t understand what in the brain makes it possible. This has all changed in the last decade. Marco Iacoboni, a leading neuroscientist whose work has been covered in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, explains the groundbreaking research into mirror neurons, the “smart cells” in our brain that allow us to understand others. From imitation to morality, from learning to addiction, from political affiliations to consumer choices, mirror neurons seem to have properties that are relevant to all these aspects of social cognition. As The New York Times reports: “The discovery is shaking up numerous scientific disciplines, shifting the understanding of culture, empathy, philosophy, language, imitation, autism and psychotherapy.” Mirroring People is the first book for the general reader on this revolutionary new science.