The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by...

Divided into four parts, the first section of this book deals with levels of processing and memory theory, the second addresses working memory and attention, the third deals with cognitive aging, and the last addresses neuroscience perspectives.

The study of infant memory has flourished in the past decade for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the tremendous growth of interest in normal and pathological adult memory that began in the late fifties. Despite its common lineage to other areas of memory research, however, infant memory has perhaps been the least integrated into the mainstream. In reading the literature, one gets a sense of discontinuity between the study of infant memory and memory at all other stages of development from childhood to old age. The reasons for this are not hard to find. The techniques used to...

For social primates like us, faces may be the most biologically significant stimuli we view. Faces provide information not only about identity but also about mood, age, sex, and direction of overt attention. Does our ability to extract this information from faces rely on special-purpose cognitive and neural mechanisms distinct from those involved in the perception of other classes of visual stimuli? If so, how do those mechanisms work? Do these mechanisms arise from experience alone, or is there an innate predisposition to create them? How is face recognition affected by development and...