November 14, 2005

Three New Books

Here are two new cog sci books in the UConn library, which might be of interest to the greater cog sci community:

The Sage Handbook of Cognition, edited by Koen Lamberts & Robert Goldstone (c2005). Sections include Perception, Attention, and Action; Learning & Memory; Language; Reasoning & Decision-Making; and Cognitive Neuropsychology; and Modeling Cognition. Amazon’s got it for $140.

Abducted, by Susan Clancy, published by Harvard (c2005). Booklist, quoted on Amazon, says “In this informal and entertaining report on her research, Clancy shows that the group of abductees she studied in 2002 were more likely to create false memories in the lab and scored high on measures of fantasy--proneness and schizotypy (personality characteristics that include perceptual aberrations and magical thinking). … She speculates that an abduction memory, though horrific, is ultimately a religious experience that incorporates contact with a higher power…”

And if you want to read more about confabulation, try Brain Fiction, a study of false memories & perceptions, by William Hirstein (a former student of Ramachandran), published by MIT (c2005). You can “search inside the book” at Amazon, if you want to peruse before buying / checking out of your library. Sections include What is Confabulation; Philosophy & Neuroscience; Confabulation & Memory; and Liars, Sociopaths, and Confabulators.

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