Order affects the results you get: Different orders of presenting material can lead to qualitatively and quantitatively different learning outcomes. These differences occur in both natural and artificial learning systems. In Order to Learn shows how order effects are crucial in human learning, instructional design, machine learning, and both symbolic and connectionist cognitive models. Each chapter explains a different aspect of how the order in which material is presented can strongly influence what is learned by humans and theoretical models of learning in a variety of domains. In...

One goal of researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence is to build theoretical models that are able to explain the flexibility and adaptiveness of biological systems. How to build a brain provides a detailed guided exploration of a new cognitive architecture that takes biological detail seriously, while addressing cognitive phenomena. The Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA) introduced in this book provides a set of tools for constructing a wide range of biologically constrained perceptual, cognitive, and motor models.

Examples of such models are provided, and...

This book aims to understand human cognition and psychology through a comprehensive computational theory of the human mind, namely, a computational "cognitive architecture" (or more specifically, the Clarion cognitive architecture). The goal of this work is to develop a unified framework for understanding the human mind, and within the unified framework, to develop process-based, mechanistic explanations of a large variety of psychological phenomena.

Specifically, the book first describes the essential Clarion framework and its cognitive-psychological justifications, then its...

Recent years have seen the rise of a remarkable partnership between the social and computational sciences on the phenomena of emotions. Rallying around the term Affective Computing, this research can be seen as revival of the cognitive science revolution, albeit garbed in the cloak of affect, rather than cognition. Traditional cognitive science research, to the extent it considered emotion at all, cases it as at best a heuristic but more commonly a harmful bias to cognition. More recent scholarship in the social sciences has upended this view.

Increasingly, emotions are viewed as a form...

In Exploring Robotic Minds: Actions, Symbols, and Consciousness as Self-Organizing Dynamic Phenomena, Jun Tani sets out to answer an essential and tantalizing question: How do our minds work? By providing an overview of his "synthetic neurorobotics" project, Tani reveals how symbols and concepts that represent the world can emerge in a neurodynamic structure--iterative interactions between the top-down subjective view, which proactively acts on the world, and the bottom-up recognition of the resultant perceptual reality. He argues that nontrivial problems of consciousness and free will could...