On Wed, 19 Jul 2017 07:50:44 -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
Anyone have suggestions for a graduate level cognition textbook?
I think one would first have to answer a couple of questions:
(1) Is the textbook being in a course that is open to master's
students and graduate students in non-experimental areas
(e.g., clinical, developmental, social, etc.)?
(2) Or is the textbook being used in a course for Ph.D. experimental
psychology students?
If (1) is the case, then one of the cognitive textbooks used in
junior/senior level courses (e.g., John Anderson's text, maybe
the textbook by Solso which is being written mainly by co-authors,
etc.). might do the trick. I would, however, supplement the text
with relevant article from sources like (Sigma Xi's) American
Scientist, Science mag, American Psychologist (I still like
Robyn Dawes' "The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models"
which lays out the classic argument between those who think
they can rationally decide what the best choice is from sources
like interview or what might be called "qualitative" data sources
versus explicit decision rules with quantitative variables that
reflect the most important features to consider -- multiple
regression equations used, say, to predict Grade Point Average
at the end of first year in college or grad school typically outperform
human judgments based on interviews, etc., but in this article
Dawes shows that arbitrary weights chosen to reflect the importance
and impact of the variable [i.e., magnitude like using 1, 2, 3,..to
reflect importance and positive/negative sign to reflect the nature
of the "effect")., and other articles and chapters written for a
general scientifically oriented audience.
If (2) is the case, I don't know if there really is a single text
that does the job though Michael Eysenck & Mark Keane's
"Cognitive Psychology: A Student's Handbook" might be
one source to consider but supplemented with articles and
chapters from the Annual Reviews (of Psychology, Neuroscience,
Sociology, Medicine, etc.), the series "Psychology of Learning
and Motivation", and other sources (e.g., comparing and contrasting
traditional rule and symbol cognitive architectures [Atkinson &
Shiffrin,
Newell's SOAR, etc.) versus neural network/connectionist cognitive
architectures [the Rumelhart crew, and others who have proposed
alternatives to traditional models] ). There is the question of
how and to what degrees one wants to cover computational models
of cognition and neuroscience models of cognition -- which may
limit one to materials published in the last 5-10 years plus some
classic/historically significant papers.
I hope that the above helps but I understand if one finds what
I say somewhat vague. The graduate courses in cognition I
took did not use a textbook (at Stony Brook Marcia Johnson
used a list of readings; when I took grad courses at NYU
Sperling, Glanzer, Braine, and Kaufman used original sources
though Sperling provided very few sources and he expected
one follow his lectures which were mostly incomprehensible ;-).
When I started to teach the Master's level course in cognition
at NYU I use an textbook like Solso or Matlin and supplemented
them with "accessible" original sources (though signal detection
theory really required me to make my lectures as clear as
possible). Some of the master's students had not been psych
majors or science majors, like English Lit majors, and I had to
be remind myself that the material was not only novel to them but
the perspective provided they brought to class could be very
different from that presented in class (i.e., the scientific study
of the mind). Sadly, some psych majors were also in this boat.
-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu
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