my mind on books

The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World by Charles Yang

principles and parameters theory –

“First, there is a set of universal principles, like the principle of structure dependence, that all languages obey. These principles lay out the bounds on how words are put together into phrases, phrases into sentences, and how phrases can (and cannot) move around in sentences. The principles are innate and don’t have to be learned: they explain the absence of the impossible errors like the linear rules that all children steer clear of…..

Second, the differences among languages can be very compactly described by about a few dozen parameters. Learning a language becomes a problem of “twenty questions”: the child needs only to fix the values of the parameters, and that’s it. Now the main thesis, and the subtitle of the book, will make sense. The process of picking parameter values for grammar learning can be given a familiar name: natural selection. The child tries out various options in the parameter system, which turn up as “errors” in her speech: these imperfections actually belong to perfect languages in universal grammar, just not the one she eventually learns. These wrong options, however, cannot last forever; a Bostonian child trying out the parameter values for Japanese will not generally understand English or be understood. Only the grammar actually used in the child’s linguistic environment will not be contradicted, and only the fittest survives. In other words, children learn a language by unlearning all other possible languages.” (p. 31)

categorical perception – the ability to distill a continuous range of signals into discrete units. (p 41) (ex. color perception, speech perception)

variational learning – start with all possible grammars, only the target language persists (p 157)

“parameters that are expressed by more sentences in the environment will be learned faster, because their competitors will be punished more often” (p 171)

• Two books on neuroethics were published this month (Aug 2007): Neuroethics: Challenges for the 21st Century by Neil Levy (Cambridge U Press) and Defining Right and Wrong in Brain Science: Essential Readings in Neuroethics ed. by Walter Glannon (Dana Press)

• Brainethics blog has compiled a list of readings in neuroethics
• Wikipedia article
• neuroethics.upenn.edu (section on narrative perspectives has extensive list on neuroethics in film and literature)

While looking up neuroscience books for yesterday’s post, I came across the Cognitive Neuroscience Arena, a website for publishers Psychology Press, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, and Routledge. In addition to featured books and journals on cognitive neuroscience, the site has a resources section that lists useful cognitive neuroscience websites, blogs and blog posts on the topic.

The Cognitive Neuroscience Arena is one of a series of arenas on academic/applied psychology and mental health topics – including a Neuropsychology Arena, a Cognitive Psychology Arena, and many more.

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This is the concluding part of a list I started a few days ago, of new & forthcoming books in the neurosciences, including neuroscience applied to fields such as religion, ethics or psychotherapy. A cumulative list will be placed in the sidebar.

Neuropsychotherapy: How the Neurosciences Inform Effective Psychotherapy by Klaus Grawe (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007).

Neuroscience, Fourth Edition by Dale Purves (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates, 2007). textbook

The Neuroscience of Psychological Therapies by Rowland W Folensbee (Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Neuroscience of Rule-Guided Behavior ed. by Silvia A Bunge; Jonathan D Wallis (New York : Oxford University Press, 2007) forthcoming Aug 29

New Frontier of Religion and Science: Religious Experience, Neuroscience, and the Transcendent by John Hick (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

On Willing Selves: Neoliberal Politics and the Challenge of Neuroscience ed. by Sabine Maasen; Barbara Sutter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) forthcoming Oct 2

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer (Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007) forthcoming Nov 1 (author’s blog, “The Frontal Cortex”)

(more…)

Here are some cognitive science titles published in 2007 or coming soon, the beginning of a cumulative list that will be placed in the sidebar:

Advances in Clinical Cognitive Science: Formal Modeling of Processes and Symptoms ed. by Richard W J Neufeld (Washington, DC : American Psychological Association, 2007)
Applying Cognitive Science to Education: Thinking and Learning in Scientific or Other Domains (Bradford Books) by F. Reif (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2007) forthcoming Jan. 08
Artificial Cognition Systems ed. by Angelo Loula; Ricardo Gudwin; João Queiroz (Hershey, PA : Idea Group Pub., 2007)
Artificial General Intelligence (Cognitive Technologies) ed. by Ben Goertzel; Cassio Pennachin (Berlin ; New York : Springer, 2007)
Bounds of Cognition by Frederick Adams; Kenneth Aizawa (Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., 2007) forthcoming Oct-Nov 07 (link to book information from publisher)
Categories in Use (Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 47) ed. by Arthur B Markman; Brian H Ross (Amsterdam ; London: Elsevier, 2007)
Cognitive Economics: New Trends, Richard Topol; Bernard Walliser, eds.( Amsterdam ; Boston : Elsevier, 2007)
The Continuity of Mind (Oxford Psychology Series) by Michael Spivey (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007)
Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience ed. by Steven M Platek; Julian Paul Keenan; Todd K Shackelford (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2007)
Handbook of Applied Cognition ed. by Francis Thomas Durso; Raymond S Nickerson (Chichester, England ; Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2007)
How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence (Bradford Books) by Rolf Pfeifer; Josh Bongard (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007) (more…)