Synesthesia and the Mixing of the Senses

• By Jamie Ward

As little Edgar Curtis lay on his porch, he remarked to his mother how the noise of the rifle range was black, the chirp of the cricket was red, and the croak of the frog was bluish. Edgar, like many other people, has synesthesia - a fascinating condition in which music can have color, words can have taste, and time and numbers float through space.

Everyone will be closely acquainted with at least 6 or 7 people who have synesthesia but you may not yet know who they are because, until very recently, synesthesia was largely hidden and unknown. Now science is uncovering its secrets and the findings are leading to a radical rethink about how our senses are organized. In this timely and thought-provoking book, Jamie Ward argues that sensory mixing is the norm even though only a few of us cross the barrier into the realms of synesthesia.

How is it possible to experience color when no color is there? Why do some people experience touch when they see someone else being touched? Can blind people be made to see again by using their other senses? Why do scientists no longer believe that there are five senses? How does the food industry exploit the links that exist between our senses? Does synesthesia have a function? The Frog Who Croaked Blue explores all these questions in a lucid and entertaining way, making it fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in the intriguing workings of the mind.

ISBN: 9780415430135

Published April 18 2008 by Routledge.

• Edited by Jackie Andrade

The term ‘memory’ encompasses our recollections of past experiences, our ability to keep track of what is happening from moment to moment, our stored knowledge, including knowledge of words and their meanings, our habits, our recognition of objects and faces, and our ability to remember to do things in the future. As such, an understanding of memory is central to an understanding of human behaviour. Memory supports our ability to speak and decode language, to find our way around, to make rational decisions, and to function successfully in society. Moreover, memory of past life-events contributes to our unique individual personalities.

Memory research has a long and important history within psychology and it continues to have fascinating everyday applications. Memory research has also helped us to understand the effects of brain damage, and has also been used to predict scholastic achievement and language development. However, memory has become such a broad field of study and research that it is extremely hard to keep up to date with new developments. The sheer scale of the growth in memory research output—and the breadth of the field—makes this new collection from Psychology Press especially timely and welcome. It will enable ready access to the most influential and important works across the full gamut of the discipline, encouraging a broader appreciation of the field and mutual influences within it.

Edited by a leading memory researcher, the four volumes in this collection—on the structure of memory, memory processes (including theories of forgetting), working memory, and the constraints on memory—bring together carefully selected key historical papers along with cutting-edge research. The organization of the collection, broadly by research domain, together with the editor’s newly written Introduction, will enable users to make sense of the wide range of approaches, theories, and concepts that have informed memory research to date. It is an essential reference work destined to be valued as a vital research resource by all scholars and students of the subject.

ISBN: 9780415413237

Published October 31 2007 by Psychology Press.

Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience

• By William Bechtel

A variety of scientific disciplines have set as their task explaining mental activities, recognizing that in some way these activities depend upon our brain. But, until recently, the opportunities to conduct experiments directly on our brains were limited. As a result, research efforts were split between disciplines such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that investigated behavior, while disciplines such as neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and genetics experimented on the brains of non-human animals. In recent decades these disciplines integrated, and with the advent of techniques for imaging activity in human brains, the term cognitive neuroscience has been applied to the integrated investigations of mind and brain. This book is a philosophical examination of how these disciplines continue in the mission of explaining our mental capacities.

ISBN: 9780805863338

Published October 29 2007 by Psychology Press (formerly published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

Cognitive, Neuroscience, Developmental, and Applied Perspectives

• Edited by Matthias Kliegel, Mark A. McDaniel, Gilles O. Einstein

Over the last decade, the topic of prospective memory – the encoding, storage and delayed retrieval of intended actions – has attracted much interest, and this is reflected in a rapidly growing body of literature: 350 scientific articles have been published on this topic since the appearance of the first edited book in 1996. In addition to the quantity, the quality and diversity of approaches to research in the field has also developed rapidly.

Prospective Memory provides an accessible, integrated guide to the expanded literature on the topic. While many of the authors also contributed to the 1996 book and can be regarded as the founders of current prospective memory research, other contributions come from authors who are relatively new to the field and who are examining broader aspects of prospective memory and, as a result, extending our understanding of it. Besides more generally reviewing the expanded literature, all authors have been encouraged to consider future directions for research and to raise questions that they believe all researchers in this area will need to address. The book is divided into four sections that together provide a broad and deep introduction to the cognitive, neuroscience, developmental, and applied aspects of prospective memory. Following the model of the first prospective memory volume, prominent memory researchers evaluate the papers in each section and comment more generally on the state of prospective memory research in the four major areas targeted.

ISBN: 9780805858587

Published October 16 2007 by Psychology Press (formerly published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

• By Vesna Mildner

This is a book about speech and language. It is primarily intended for those interested in speech and its neurophysiological bases: phoneticians, linguists, educators, speech therapists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. Although speech and language are its central topic, it provides information about related topics as well (e.g. structure and functioning of the central nervous system, research methods in neuroscience, theories and models of speech production and perception, learning, and memory). Data on clinical populations are given in parallel with studies of healthy subjects because such comparisons can give a better understanding of intact and disordered speech and language functions.

There is a review of literature (more than 600 sources) and research results covering areas such as neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, development of the nervous system, sex differences, history of neurolinguistics, behavioral, neuroimaging and other research methods in neuroscience, linguistics and psychology, theories and models of the nervous system function including speech and language processing, kinds of memory and learning and their neural substrates, critical periods, various aspects of normal speech and language processes (e.g. phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, reading), bilingualism, speech and language disorders, and many others.

Newcomers to the field of neurolinguistics will find it as readable as professionals will because it is organized in a way that gives the readers flexibility and an individual approach to the text. The language is simple but all the technical terms are provided, explained, and illustrated. A comprehensive glossary provides additional information.

ISBN: 9780805854350

Published October 15 2007 by Psychology Press (formerly published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

A special issue of Social Neuroscience

• Edited by Jean Decety, Dan Batson

Interpersonal sensitivity refers to our ability to perceive and respond with care to the internal states of other people, understand the antecedents of those states, and predict the subsequent events that will result. Guest editors neuroscientist Jean Decety and social psychologist Dan Batson bring together in this special issue of Social Neuroscience new research findings from empirical studies, including work with adults and children, genetics, functional neuroimaging, individual differences, and behavioral measures, which examine how we process and respond to information about our fellow individuals. By combining biological and psychological approaches, this special issue of Social Neuroscience sheds new light on the complex and multi-faceted phenomenon of interpersonal sensitivity, including empathy and sympathy.

ISBN: 9781841698380

Published September 14 2007 by Psychology Press.

• Edited by John J. Rieser, Daniel H. Ashmead, Ford Ebner, Anne L. Corn

Research into the development of sensory structures in the brains of blind or visually-impaired individuals has opened a window into important ways in which the mind works. In these individuals, the part of the brain that is usually devoted to processing visual information is given over to increased processing of the touch and hearing sense. This demonstration of brain plasticity is of great importance to cognitive neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, and has real implications for rehabilitation and education specialists who work with the visually impaired. This is an interdisciplinary book, featuring chapters from cognitive and developmental psychologists, neurologists and neuroscientists, and rehabilitation specialists and educators. All of these groups do research in this area but generally do not collaborate with one another. This book is an attempt to bring together the disparate threads of research into a single volume, appropriate for all three markets.

ISBN: 9780805855517

Published August 10 2007 by Psychology Press (formerly published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

What's wrong with education - and what should we do about it?

• By Paul Kelley

Making Minds is a controversial critique of our education systems. The author is a school leader ‘at the forefront of scientific and technological advancement in schools’ who, as an American, ‘felt comfortable taking on the British establishment’ (The Times Educational Supplement).

Making Minds is written for general readers- especially parents- as well as educational professionals. The book examines the underlying limitations that have been accepted in education over the past two thousand years. The author challenges common assumptions about education through evidence-based, political, ethical, and emotional arguments, as well as examining case studies such as university admissions and the autism ‘epidemic’.

Making Minds describes a more productive scientific approach to learning, drawing on recent research findings, particularly in the US and UK. The author illustrates how new research methods, new technologies, and very recent discoveries in neuroscience that will, in the end, allow us to make minds.

ISBN: 9780415414104

Published July 12 2007 by Routledge.

Inference and Comprehension Processes

• Edited by Franz Schmalhofer, Charles A. Perfetti

ISBN: 9780805852622

Published March 05 2007 by Psychology Press (formerly published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

A Special Issue of Social Neuroscience

• Edited by Rebecca Saxe, Simon Baron-Cohen

Investigations of the neural basis of theory of mind - the ability to think about other people's thoughts - only recently became feasible; now, the number of such investigations and the sophistication of the results are accelerating dramatically.

The articles in this special issue use a wide range of techniques (including fMRI, EEG, TMS, and psychophisiology) and subject populations (including children, twins, and patients with developmental or acquired neural damage) to address fundamental questions about the cognitive and neural structure of theory of mind.

Topics include: (1) the relationship between theory of mind and other, perhaps "precursor", social cognitive processes, such as empathy and the perception of biological motion; (2) the relationship between theory of mind and domain-general cognitive functions, such as executive function and language; and (3) how theory of mind is deployed in real social contexts, such as social exchange.

ISBN: 9781841698168

Published February 21 2007 by Psychology Press.