http://www.dundee.ac.uk/psychology/taharley/pcgn_harley_review.pdf
Richard's cowriter above reviews the state of cognitive neuropsychology, [and the Handbook of Cognitive Neuropsychology] painting a picture of v. considerable disagreement in the discipline. I'd be interested if anyone can recommend similar overviews of cognitive science. I'd be particularlyinterested to have some kind of survey of the acceptance of embodied cognitive science within the field as a whole. My impression is it's still limited, although relentlessly growing. But anyway a good overview would be good to have:
"While a description of any subject will describe only theories, what is quite remarkable about those described in the HCN is the extent to which they conflict. Furthermore, the conflict between theories is often at a high level: To what extent does the mind use symbolic rather than subsymbolic processing? How modular is it? How closely tied are psychological processes to neural pathways? How many routes are involved in any one process? and so on. Here are a couple of examples from the HCN. Shelton and Caramazza, in their chapter on the organisation of semantic memory, argue for a domain-specific knowledge hypothesis that views knowledge as being organised into broad domains deriving from specialised neural mechanisms, against the otherwise prevalent modality-specific, sensory-functional theory. Nickels's chapter reflects the dominant view in studies based on normal and brain participants, and computational modelling, that there is a stage of lemma access in speech production; Caramazza (1997) argues convincingly against the existence of such a stage. There is even disagreement about what commonly used terms mean: As Nickels notes in her chapter on spoken word production, the words "semantics" and "concepts" are both used to refer to general preverbal aspects of knowledge and to lexically specific aspects of meaning. To these examples one can add: How many routes are involved in reading? Is there a general phonological deficit underlying phonological dyslexia? Is speech production an interactive process? How many phonological buffers are there? and so on. While debate and controversy are signs of a healthy, developing subject, one can have too much of a good thing. Although any particular description of a theory sounds sensible, overall the HCN leaves me in a turmoil of confusion." ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
