Lifespan Cognition

Aims to create a bridge across cognitive development and cognitive aging. This volume studies the rise and fall of specific cognitive functions, such as attention, executive functioning, memory, working memory, representations, and individual differences to find ways in which the study of development and decline converge on common mechanisms.

This book synthesizes the literature on emotional development and cognition across the lifespan. The book proposes a core language by which to describe positive and problematic developmental changes by recourse to a parsimonious set of core principles, such as elevations or declines in tension thresholds and their relation to the waxing and waning of the cognitive system over the life course. It integrates, similarly, the lifelong consequences of the positive or damaging aspects of the social milieu in fostering increases in tension thresholds with their advanced capacity for maintaining equilibrium and warding off stress versus a lowering of tension thresholds with disturbances of equilibrium maintenance and heightened susceptibility to stress and deregulation.

Social Cognition brings together diverse and timely writings that highlight cutting-edge research and theories on the development of social cognition and social behavior across species and the life span. The volume is organized according to two central themes that address issues of continuity and change both at the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic level. First, the book addresses to what extent social cognitive abilities and behaviors are shared across species, versus abilities and capacities that are uniquely human. Second, it covers to what extent social cognitive abilities and behaviors are continuous across periods of development within and across the life span, versus their change with age. This volume offers a fresh perspective on social cognition and behavior, and shows the value of bringing together different disciplines to illuminate our understanding of the origins, mechanisms, functions, and development of the many capacities that have evolved to facilitate and regulate a wide variety of behaviors fine-tuned to group living.

In the past fifty years, scholars of human development have been moving from studying change in humans within sharply defined periods, to seeing many more of these phenomenon as more profitably studied over time and in relation to other processes. The Handbook of Life-Span Development, Volume 1: Cognition, Biology, and Methods presents the study of human development conducted by the best scholars in the 21st century. Social workers, counselors and public health workers will receive coverage of of the biological and cognitive aspects of human change across the lifespan.

Cognitive aging is a flourishing area of research. A significant amount of new data, a number of new theoretical notions, and many new research issues have been generated in the past ten years. This new edition reviews new findings and theories, enables the reader to assess where the field is today, and evaluates its points of growth. The chapters are organized to run from reviews of current work on neuroimaging, neuropsychology, genetics and the concept of brain reserve, through the 'mainstream' topics of attention, memory, knowledge and language, to a consideration of individual differences and of cognitive aging in a lifespan context. This edition continues to feature the broad range of its predecessors, while also providing critical assessments of current theories and findings.

This volume has as its primary aim the examination of issues concerning executive function and frontal lobe development. While many texts have addressed these issues, this is the first to do so within a specifically developmental framework. This area of cognitive function has received increasing attention over the past decade, and it is now established that the frontal lobes, and associated executive functions, are critical for efficient functioning in daily life. It is also clear, and of particular relevance to this text, that these functions develop gradually through childhood, and then deteriorate during old age. These developmental trajectories, and the impact of any interruption to them, are the focus of this volume.

Each chapter in this book is written by, and devoted to the original work of a leading researcher in his or her own field. The book presents an integrative approach to the psychological study of time in an attempt to bring to light similarities between bodies of research which have been developed independently within different theoretical frameworks - from Piaget's structuralist-organismic model, to information processing approaches. The chapters are organized in a life-span perspective, with different chapters focusing on different age-levels. It includes analyses of time perception in infancy, temporal systems in the developing language, time conception, time measurement and time reading in middle childhood and adolescence, as well as various models of time perception in the adult, both normal and abnormal. A rich concept such as time sheds light on a wide variety of major topics in psychology; the book will be of value to cognitive, developmental and educational psychologists, as well as to psycholinguists.

The study of human cognitive processes provides insight into why we act or react and can help us predict future behaviors. In Cognition, authors Thomas Farmer and Margaret Matlin present an engaging and highly relatable examination of how these processes work, and how they are responsible for the way we perceive and interpret the world around us. Broad in scope without sacrificing depth of detail, this text emphasizes the link between conceptual cognitive psychology and real-world experience; case studies, current trends, and historical perspectives merge to provide a comprehensive understanding of core principles and theories. This new Tenth Edition has been updated to reflect the latest research, technology, and thinking, with more in-depth coverage of topics rising to prominence in the field’s current knowledge base. Expanded explanations balance classical and contemporary approaches to specific topics, while additional experiments and an emphasis on methodology and experimental design are included to facilitate a greater appreciation of the field’s rigorous research.