Cognitive Psychology — The Rule of the Mind: Behaviour and the Physiological Equation

Chapter one is the best part of the book. It is built on the idea that humans cannot survive on instinct and reflex alone and instead turn data into knowledge and behaviour through symbolic thought. «Being aware that one is aware», conceptualising oneself as an «I», a «theory of mind» about others, introspection, conscience, language and hypothetical thinking are explained in turn. The paragraphs showing that hypothetical thinking underlies scientific reasoning are clear; but some generalisations — that «adults without schooling» cannot think hypothetically, that «what the psychopath has lost is a system of values» — are unsourced and crude.

Chapter two — the history of cognitive neuroscience — is the worst-edited part of the book. Phrenology, the localisationist view (Hughlings Jackson), the aggregate-field view (Flourens), behaviourism and the cognitive revolution, Golgi and Cajal's neuron doctrine, Penfield, Sperry and Gazzaniga are presented in order, but the sentences often read like machine translation: repetitions such as «is studied and studied», PET and fMRI dangling from the middle of a broken sentence, and garbled terms such as «ocular hegemony columns» (ocular dominance columns). There are factual errors too: Sperry and Gazzaniga's split-brain work dates from the 1960s, not the 1950s.

Chapter three — sensation and perception — is in a completely different style: short definitions, bullet points and examples familiar from Turkish high-school psychology textbooks. For selective perception, «two sheep and a shepherd in a classroom»; for perceptual constancy, «the Turkish flag, which looks black in the dark, still being perceived as red»; for spatial perception, «Malatya is in the east of Turkey». These examples work didactically, but their presence in a supposedly translated book by an English-language author raises serious questions about the text's origin. Statements such as «hallucinations are mostly seen in the mentally ill and in alcoholics» are outdated and stigmatising.

Chapter four — «pattern recognition» — is the book's biggest mismatch. In cognitive psychology this topic concerns how humans recognise objects (template matching, feature analysis, Biederman's recognition-by-components theory and so on); the book instead spends page after page on feature extraction and feature selection in machine learning, filter, wrapper and hybrid algorithms, databases and computational cost. The text has clearly been taken from a computer-science source and says almost nothing about human cognition.

As we have seen in other volumes of the series (for instance, part of «Far Eastern Civilisations» being identical to «Shintoism»), texts compiled from various sources have been gathered under the name «Angela Dainty»; the back-cover promise of «empirical data on anxiety treatment, case formulations and step-by-step instructions on behavioural intervention» does not match the book's content at all.

In the end the book cannot be recommended as an introduction to cognitive psychology: while the philosophical essay of chapter one and the simple examples of chapter three are of some use, as a whole the text offers neither a coherent theoretical framework nor reliable information. For readers interested in the subject, a systematic source such as E. Bruce Goldstein's textbook, reviewed on our site, would be a far better choice.

• Short chapters divided by headings and bullet points
• Diagrams (e.g. a block diagram of a pattern-recognition system)
• A bibliography and the translator's sources at the end