For years, both psychologists and the general public have been fascinated with the notion that there are gender differences in cognitive abilities; even now, flashy cover stories exploiting this idea dominate major news magazines, while research focuses on differences in verbal, mathematical, spatial, and scientific abilities across gender. This new volume in the Counterpoints series not only summarizes and addresses the validity (or invalidity) of such research, but also questions its ideology and consequences. Why do we search so intently for these differences? And what are the social and...

In all industrialized countries, closed head injuries are responsible for vast numbers of hospital admissions and days of work lost. For instance, about 120,000 patients are admitted to hospital in the United Kingdom each year with a diagnosis that reflects closed head injury. Such injuries are a major cause of deaths following accidents, especially those that involve children and young people, and they are also a major cause of handicap and morbidity among the survivors. This clinical condition is intrinsically a neurological one, but its proper evaluation demands an understanding of the...

This advanced undergraduate textbook structures and integrates research on imagery under four headings: imagery as a personal or phenomenal experience; imagery as a mental representation; imagery as a property or attribute of materials; and imagery as a cognitive process that is under strategic control. A major part of the discussion under each of these headings concerns the ways in which the structures, mechanisms, and processes in the brain mediate our subjective experience of imagery and our observable behaviour when we make use of it in cognitive tasks.

This book explains the principal qualitative methods and applies them to psychological problems. It is designed for use in psychology and also other branches of social science. The books main aim is to increase people's confidence to use qualitative methods in their own research.

Howard Andrew Knox (1885-1949) served as assistant surgeon at Ellis Island during the 1910s, administering a range of verbal and nonverbal tests to determine the mental capacity of potential immigrants. An early proponent of nonverbal intelligence testing (largely through the use of formboards and picture puzzles), Knox developed an evaluative approach that today informs the techniques of practitioners and researchers. Whether adapted to measure intelligence and performance in children, military recruits, neurological and psychiatric patients, or the average job applicant, Knox's pioneering...

This book originated in a symposium that was held at the London Conference of the British Psychological Society (BPS) in December 1988. The fact that the various contributors were able to assemble at all was very much due to the kind generosity of the Scientific Affairs Board of the BPS, which had made resources available from its Initiatives Fund to enable Barbara Sommer to travel to the United Kingdom to participate in the event. The broad continuity among the contributions to this symposium in terms of their underlying themes led us to the view that a single volume consisting of original...

The locus of concreteness effects in memory for verbal materials has been described here in terms of the processing of shared and distinctive information. This theoretical view is consistent with a variety of findings previously taken as support for dual coding, insofar as both verbal and perceptual information may be involved in comprehending high-imagery sentences and in learning lists of concrete words. But going beyond previous accounts of imagery, this view also can provide explanations for several findings that appear contradictory to the thesis that concrete and abstract materials...