Psychology Press Ltd

Reflecting recent changes in the way cognition and the brain are studied, this thoroughly updated third edition of the best-selling textbook provides a comprehensive and student-friendly guide to cognitive neuroscience. Jamie Ward provides an easy-to-follow introduction to neural structure and function, as well as all the key methods and procedures of cognitive neuroscience, with a view to helping students understand how they can be used to shed light on the neural basis of cognition. The book presents an up-to-date overview of the latest theories and findings in all the key topics in cognitive neuroscience, including vision, memory, speech and language, hearing, numeracy, executive function, social and emotional behaviour and developmental neuroscience, as well as a new chapter on attention. Throughout, case studies, newspaper reports and everyday examples are used to help students understand the more challenging ideas that underpin the subject. In addition each chapter includes: * Summaries of key terms and points * Example essay questions * Recommended further reading * Feature boxes exploring interesting and popular questions and their implications for the subject. Written in an engaging style by a leading researcher in the field, and presented in full-color including numerous illustrative materials, this book will be invaluable as a core text for undergraduate modules in cognitive neuroscience. It can also be used as a key text on courses in cognition, cognitive neuropsychology, biopsychology or brain and behavior. Those embarking on research will find it an invaluable starting point and reference. The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience, 3rd Edition is supported by a companion website, featuring helpful resources for both students and instructors.

Some of the most fascinating deficits in neuropsychology concern the failure to recognise common objects from one semantic category, such as living things, when there is no such difficulty with objects from another, such as non-living things. Over the past twenty years, numerous cases of these 'category specific' recognition and naming problems have been documented and several competing theories have been developed to account for the patients' disorders. Category Specificity in Brain and Mind draws together the neuropsychological literature on category-specific impairments, with research on how children develop knowledge about different categories, functional brain imaging work and computational models of object recognition and semantic memory. The chapters are written by internationally leading psychologists and neuroscientists and the result is a review of the most up-to-date thinking on how knowledge about different categories is acquired and organized in the mind, and where it is represented in the human brain. The text will be essential reading for advanced undergraduates and researchers in the field of category specificity and a rich source of information for neuropsychologists, experimental and developmental psychologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers.