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The metaphor of a "cognitive map"has attracted wide interest since it was first proposed in the late 1940s. Researchers from fields as diverse as psychology, geography, and urban planning have explored how humans process and use spatial information, often with the view of explaining why people make wayfinding errors or what makes one person a better navigator than another. Cognitive psychologists have broken navigation down into its component steps and shown it to be an interplay of neurocognitive functions, such as "spatial updating"and "reference frames"or "perception-action couplings."But there has also been an intense debate among biologists over whether animals have cognitive maps or ha...
An analysis of human and non-human animals' spatial cognitive, perceptual, and behavioural processes through mapping internal and external spatial knowledge.
Spatial cognition is a broad field of enquiry, emerging from a wide range of disciplines and incorporating a wide variety of paradigms that have been employed with human and animal subjects. This volume is part of a two- volume handbook reviewing the major paradigms used in each of the contributors' research areas.; This volume considers the issues of neurophysiological aspects of spatial cognition, the assessment of cognitive spatial deficits arising from neural damage in humans and animals, and the observation of spatial behaviours in animals in their natural habitats.; This handbook should be of interest to new and old students alike. The student new to spatial research can be brought up-to- speed with a particular range of techniques, made aware of the background and pitfalls of particular approaches, and directed toward useful sources. For seasoned researchers, the handbook provides a rapid scan of the available tools that they might wish to consider as alternatives when wishing to answer a particular "spatial" research problem.
Analysis and dissociation have proved to be useful tools to understand the basic functions of the brain and the mind, which therefore have been decomposed to a multitude of ever smaller subsystems and pieces by most scientific approaches. However, the understanding of complex functions such as consciousness will not succeed without a more global consideration of the ways the mind-brain works. This implies that synthesis rather than analysis should be applied to the brain. The present book offers a collection of contributions ranging from sensory and motor cognitive neuroscience to mood management and thought, which all focus on the dissociation between conscious (explicit) and nonconscious (implicit) processing in different cognitive situations. The contributions in this book clearly demonstrate that conscious and nonconscious processes typically interact in complex ways. The central message of this collection of papers is: In order to understand how the brain operates as one integrated whole that generates cognition and behaviour, we need to reassemble the brain and mind and put all the conscious and nonconscious pieces back together again. (Series B)
This volume presents the proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on "Advances in Vertebrate Neuroethology" held at the University of Kassel, Federal Republic of Germany in August 1981. During the last decade much progress has been made in understanding the neurophysiological bases of behavior in both vertebrates and invertebrates. The reason for this is that a number of new physiological, anatomical, and histochemical techniques have recently been developed for brain research which can now be combined with ethological methods for the analysis of animal behavior to form a new field of research known as "Neuroethology". The term Neuroethology was originally introduced by S.L.Brown and R.W.Hunsperger (1963) in connection with studies on the activation of agonistic behaviors by electrical brain stimulation in cats. Neuroethology was more closely defined by G.Hoyle (1970) in the context of a review on cellular mechanisms underlying behavior of invertebrates. Since the 6th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience held in Toronto in 1976, Neuroethology has become established as a session topic.
This comprehensive Handbook summarizes existing work and presents new concepts and empirical results from leading scholars in the multidisciplinary field of behavioral and cognitive geography, the study of the human mind, and activity in and concerning space, place, and environment. It provides the broadest and most inclusive coverage of the field so far, including work relevant to human geography, cartography, and geographic information science.
This volume includes papers originally presented at the 11th annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting (CNS 02) held in July 2002 at the Congress Plaza Hotel & Convention Center in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The CNS meetings bring together computational neuroscientists representing many different fields and backgrounds as well as many different experimental preparations and theoretical approaches. The papers published here range from pure experimental neurobiology, to neuro-ethology, mathematics, physics, and engineering. In all cases the research described is focused on understanding how nervous systems compute. The actual subjects of the research include a highly diverse number of preparations, modeling approaches and analysis techniques. Accordingly, this volume reflects the breadth and depth of current research in computational neuroscience taking place throughout the world.
The dominance of vision is so strong in sighted people that touch is sometimes considered as a minor perceptual modality. However, touch is a powerful tool which contributes significantly to our knowledge of space and objects. Its intensive use by blind persons allows them to reach the same levels of knowledge and cognition as their sighted peers.In this book, specialized researchers present the recent state of knowledge about the cognitive functioning of touch. After an analysis of the neurophysiology and neuropsychology of touch, exploratory manual behaviors, intramodal haptic (tactual-kinesthetic) abilities and cross-modal visual-tactual coordination are examined in infants, children and adults, and in non-human primates. These studies concern both sighted and blind persons in order to know whether early visual deprivation modifies the modes of processing space and objects. The last section is devoted to the technical devices favoring the school and social integration of the young blind: Braille reading, use of raised maps and drawings, “sensory substitution” displays, and new technologies of communication adapted for the blind. (Series B)
Research on the multiple aspects of cognitive impairment in Down syndrome (DS), from genes to behavior to treatment, has made tremendous progress in the last decade. The study of congenital intellectual disabilities such as DS is challenging since they originate from the earliest stages of development and both the acquisition of cognitive skills and neurodegenerative pathologies are cumulative. Comorbidities such as cardiac malformations, sleep apnea, diabetes and dementia are frequent in the DS population, as well, and their increased risk provides a means of assessing early stages of these pathologies that is relevant to the general population. Notably, persons with DS will develop the his...