On The Time Relations Of Mental Processes

Originally published in 1978 Volume 5 of this Handbook reflects a single theoretical orientation, that characterized by the term human information processing in the literature at the time, but which ranges over a very broad spectrum of cognitive activities. The first two chapters give some overall picture of the background, goals, method, and limitations of the information-processing approach. The remaining chapters treat in detail some principal areas of application – visual processing, mental chronometry, representation of spatial information in memory, problem solving, and the theory of instruction. The first three volumes of the Handbook presented an overview of the field, followed by treatments of conditioning, behavior theory, and human learning and retention. With the fourth volume, the focus of attention shifted from the domain of learning theory to that of cognitive psychology.

Originally published in 1974, this volume presents seven detailed views of human information processing at the time. While no single volume can do justice to the breadth of the area, it was hoped that the present selections reflected both the content and methodological approaches currently used by experimental psychologists concerned with the issues and problems of human information processing. The organization of the book is simple, proceeding from the human performance end of the continuum, an overview of which is given in the first chapter. Successive chapters are progressively more concerned with human cognition, and the last chapter gives an overview of human cognition. The intervening chapters are devoted to more specific topics and yield a detailed portrait of the models, findings, and methodology of human information processing.

The crux of the debate between proponents of behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology focuses on the issue of accessibility. Cognitivists believe that mental mechanisms and processes are accessible, and that their inner workings can be inferred from experimental observations of behavior. Behaviorists, on the contrary, believe that mental processes and mechanisms are inaccessible, and that nothing important about them can be inferred from even the most cleverly designed empirical studies. One argument that is repeatedly raised by cognitivists is that even though mental processes are not directly accessible, this should not be a barrier to unravelling the nature of the inner mental processes and mechanisms. Inference works for other sciences, such as physics, so why not psychology? If physics can work so successfully with their kind of inaccessibility to make enormous theoretical progress, then why not psychology? As with most previous psychological debates, there is no "killer argument" that can provide an unambiguous resolution. In its absence, author William Uttal explores the differing properties of physical and psychological time, space, and mathematics before coming to the conclusion that there are major discrepancies between the properties of the respective subject matters that make the analogy of comparable inaccessibilities a false one. This title was first published in 2008.

In this volume, distinguished neurologist Jason W. Brown extends the microgenetic theory of the mind by offering a new approach to the problem of time and free will. Brown bases his work on a unitary process model of brain and behavior. He examines the problem of subjective time and free will, the experiential present, the nature of intentionality, and the creative properties of physical growth and mental process.

In this new book, Robert W. Proctor curates a collection of celebrated and seminal articles from the past 125 years of the American Journal of Psychology . The debut volume in the University of Illinois Press TMs Common Threads series, Higher Mental Processes reprints a suite of ten articles on processes of higher-order thinking. Proctor, current editor of the AJP , begins the volume with a special introduction that provides historical and scientific context for the contributions. Contributors: P. Baratta, M. H. Birnbaum, M. E. Bulbrook, L. S. Buyer, R. A. Carlson, S. N. F. Chant, A. A. Cleveland, T. D. Cutsforth, R. L. Dominowski, E. Galanter, P. N. Johnson-Laird, M. G. Preston, Robert W. Proctor, and J. Tagart.

This book is the first to introduce the study of cognition in terms of the major conceptual themes that underlie virtually all the substantive topics.

Focusing on the significance of time in information processing, this text looks at time both as an object of information processing and as a constituent factor in information processing, and seeks to define a unified view of psychological time.