Cognitive studies Books

Book SynopsisDina Mendonça is Researcher at the New University of Lisbon, Portugal.Manuel Curado is Professor at the University of Minho, Portugal.Steven S. Gouveia is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Mind, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics Unit of the Royal Institute of Mental Health, University of Ottawa, Canada.Trade ReviewThis volume highlights one of the key bridges of our time, predictive coding. It brings together different perspectives by leading figures in both fields of neuroscience and philosophy, making it unique and a must-read for everybody interested in bridging the gap of neuroscience and philosophy. * Georg Northoff, Michael Smith Chair in Neurosciences and Mental Health, Institute of Mental Health Research, University of Ottawa, Canada *Though relative newcomers to the field, predictive processing accounts of mind, cognition, self and psychopathology are already establishing their secure place in the philosophical and scientific landscape. They must be reckoned with, and this fine and timely collection does just that. Drawing together defenders and critics, its chapters ask the crucial questions. Anyone aiming to get on top this exciting intellectual development will want to read the first-rate set of contributions in this outstanding volume. * Daniel D. Hutto, Senior Professor of Philosophical Psychology, University of Wollongong, Australia *Table of ContentsList of Contributors Preface: The Brain as a Prediction Machine, Anil Seth Introduction, Dina Mendonça, Manuel Curado & Steven S. Gouveia Part I: Predictive Processing: Philosophical Approaches 1. Predictive Processing and Representation: How Less Can Be More, Erik Myin and Thomas van Es 2. A Humean Challenge to Predictive Coding, Colin Klein 3. Are Markov Blankets Real and Does it Matter?, Richard Menary and Alexander J. Gillett 4. Predictive Processing and Metaphysical Views of the Self, Robert Clowes and Klaus Gärtner Part II: Predictive Processing: Cognitive Science and Neuroscientific Approaches 5. From the Retina to Action: Dynamics of Predictive Processing in the Visual System, Laurent Perrinet 6. Predictive Processing and Consciousness: Prediction Fallacy and its Spatiotemporal Resolution, Steven S. Gouveia 7. The Many Faces of Attention: Why Precision Optimization is not Attention, Sina Fazelpour and Madeleine Ransom 8. Predictive Processing: Does it Compute?, Chris Thornton Part III: Predictive Processing: Mental Health 9. The Predictive Brain, Conscious Experience and Brain-related Conditions, Lisa Feldman Barrett and Lorena Chanes 10. Disconnection and Diaschisis: Active Inference in Neuropsychology, Thomas Parr and Karl Friston 11. The Phenomenology and Predictive Processing of Time in Depression, Zachariah Neemeh and Shaun Gallagher 12. Why Use Predictive Processing to Explain Psychopathology? The Case of Anorexia Nervosa, Jakob Hohwy and Stephen Gadsby Afterword, Manuel Curado Index

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“This book’s abundant appeal and value come from following Berns through the challenges of constructing the experiment and especially of training his dog to participate. ‘Like a catcher and pitcher,’ he writes, he and his dog ‘became a team.’ The satisfaction of that relationship perhaps explains why our two species have lived together so long and happily.” —The Boston Globe “A neuroscientist wonders what goes on in the minds of our pet dogs: Do we delude ourselves when we believe that they love us? [How Dogs Love Us is] a solid introduction to an appealing new area of research.” —Kirkus “The book is as much a scientific exploration of how the canine brain might function as it is a deeply personal story about Berns’s relationship with dogs as pets and colleagues. Ultimately that connection is what makes the book compelling.” —Scientific American MIND “Thoroughly enjoyable and edifying…Five out of five stars…highly recommended.” —Your Dog “In the fascinating book How Dogs Love Us, [Berns] recounts the methods his team employed, and how their pet dogs made these groundbreaking studies possible. There’s much to learn in this engrossing read.” —Bark Magazine “Neuroscientist Gregory Berns studies dog brains to answer that eternal question: Do our dogs really love us?” —Men’s Journal “The journey Berns and his team embarked on, and are continuing, is as remarkable as the study’s conclusions to date. Berns proves what most pet lovers have always known. Our dogs are much like us.” —The Akron Beacon Journal “How Dogs Love Us is a fascinating account of a scientist’s tenacious pursuit of the unknown. Gregory Berns’s account of his lab’s Dog Project provides readers with new insights into the minds of our most loyal companions while also reminding us that scientific research should be approached with passion, love, and a bold disregard for the possibility of failure.” —Dan Ariely, author of The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty “An exciting journey to the center of a dog’s emotional mind. Berns offers hilarious descriptions of training his dog to lie still while being fed hot dogs in the MRI brain-scan machine.” —Temple Grandin, author of Animals Make Us Human “With infectious passion for dogs, science, life, and love, Gregory Berns takes us on a rollicking yet scientifically serious study of the mental life of dogs-what dogs understand and how they think. Berns’s tale is a dramatic but very funny look at how real, grubby science can accomplish great things. This is dognitive science at its insightful, passionate, and playful best.” —Patricia Churchland, author of Touching a Nerve “How Dogs Love Us is the beautifully written story of an iconoclastic neuroscientist challenging the status quo and seeking to truly understand the dogs with whom we share our lives.” —Jennifer Arnold, author of Through a Dog’s Eyes “Amazingly entertaining and super smart. In How Dogs Love Us, Gregory Berns gives us our first real look inside the brain of a dog, while simultaneously setting new standards in ethical science. A truly great read!” —Steven Kotler, author of A Small Furry Prayer “Gregory Berns’s book, packed with solid scientific research and warm personal stories, will set the agenda for future research on the minds and emotional lives of animals.” —Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals “Fast, fun, and funny, Gregory Berns demonstrates scientifically that dogs are people, too.” —Laurence Gonzales, author of Surviving Survival “Gregory Berns’s amusing story about his dogs, his daughters, and a giant magnet communicates as no other what fun science can be.” —Frans de Waal, author of The Bonobo and the Atheist “This book lets you see inside the mind of a dog as never before. How Dogs Love Us will revolutionize how we understand animals—especially our dogs. This is a must-read for animal lovers and neuroscientists alike.” —Brian Hare, author of The Genius of Dogs “Berns is an excellent writer. His explanations of the scientific thinking behind the Dog Project (as he calls his experiment) are crisp and clear and accessible to a nonscientist without being condescending…Some of the best parts of How Dogs Love Us, though, are about the questions, not the answers. In his account of the slow, meticulous, day-to-day process of creating a scientific study, Berns has produced one of the best accounts of how science is ‘done.’” —Chicago Reader “How Dogs Love Us makes a thought-provoking and often humorous case for something canine lovers have suspected for years: dogs are not simply ‘Pavlovian learning machines’ but, rather, sentient beings with a high level of empathy and an affinity for social learning. In answering his original question, he sparks many more about how we value and care for our canine companions.” —Kirsten Galles, Shelf Awareness “Berns’s book is a beautiful story about dogs, love and neurology that shows how nonhuman relationships are inspiring researches to look at animals in new ways, for their benefit and ours.” —Rebecca Skloot, New York Times Book Review

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Book SynopsisRepetitive sequences play a major role as a pattern-building device and are a basic syntagmatic linguistic means on all language levels in spoken and signed languages. Little attention has been paid to investigating them in multimodal language use. Do gestures exhibit different types of repetitive sequences? Do they build complex units based on these types and if so, how is the pattern building to be described? How is the interrelation of gestural and spoken units in such complex units? Is it possible to identify repetitive patterns that are comparable to spoken and signed languages and/or patterns specific to the gestural modality? Based on a corpus-analysis of multimodal usage-events, 7 chapters explore gestural repetitions with regard to their structure, semantic and syntactic relevance for multimodal utterances, and cognitive saliency. Fine-grained cognitive-linguistic analyses of multimodal usage events reveal that gestural repetitions are not only a basic principle of building patterns in spoken and signed languages, but also in gestures.　By addressing questions of mediality and multimodality of language-in-use, the book contributes to the investigation of repetition as a fundamental means of sign and meaning construction (crosscutting modalities) and enhances the understanding of the multimodal character of language in use.

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