Neuroscience Of Rule Guided Behavior

Rules are central to human behaviour, but until now the field of neuroscience lacked a unified approach to understanding them. This book brings together the world's leading cognitive and systems neuroscientists to explain the most recent research on rule-guided behaviour.

This book examines how humans evolved from the cosmos and prebiotic earth and what types of biological, chemical, and physical sciences drove this complex process. The author presents his view of nature which attributes the rising complexity of life to the continual increasing of information content, first in genes and then in brains.

Principles of Frontal Lobe Function, Second Edition is an expanded volume, divided into 9 sections representing major research and clinical disciples, including new topics such as social neuroscience. This book will provide clinicians, researchers, and students with the most current information as the mystery of the frontal lobes is unraveled.

The CNS meetings bring together computational neuroscientists representing many different fields and backgrounds as well as many different experimental preparations and theoretical approaches. The papers published here range from pure experimental neurobiology, to neuro-ethology, mathematics, physics, and engineering. In all cases the research described is focused on understanding how nervous systems compute. The actual subjects of the research include a highly diverse number of preparations, modeling approaches and analysis techniques. Accordingly, this volume reflects the breadth and depth of current research in computational neuroscience taking place throughout the world.

The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, Second Edition, Three Voluime Set is an award-winning three-volume reference on human action and reaction, and the thoughts, feelings, and physiological functions behind those actions. Presented alphabetically by title, 300 articles probe both enduring and exciting new topics in physiological psychology, perception, personality, abnormal and clinical psychology, cognition and learning, social psychology, developmental psychology, language, and applied contexts. Written by leading scientists in these disciplines, every article has been peer-reviewed to establish clarity, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. The most comprehensive reference source to provide both depth and breadth to the study of human behavior, the encyclopedia will again be a much-used reference source. This set appeals to public, corporate, university and college libraries, libraries in two-year colleges, and some secondary schools. Carefully crafted, well written, and thoroughly indexed, the encyclopedia helps users—whether they are students just beginning formal study of the broad field or specialists in a branch of psychology—understand the field and how and why humans behave as we do. Named a 2013 Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association's Choice publication Concise entries (ten pages on average) provide foundational knowledge of the field Each article features suggested further readings, a list of related websites, a 5-10 word glossary and a definition paragraph, and cross-references to related articles in the encyclopedi Newly expanded editorial board and a host of international contributors from the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom

To understand the mind, we need to draw equally on the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience. But these two fields have very separate intellectual roots, and very different styles. So how can these two be reconciled in order to develop a full understanding of the mind and brain.This is the focus of this landmark new book.

Preface -- Editor's introduction -- Rational choice theory, heuristics and biases -- Evolutionary approaches to rational choice -- Multiple interpretations of rationality in offender decision making -- Situational crime prevention and offender decision making -- Biosocial criminology and models of criminal decision making -- Perceptual deterrence -- Game theory -- Dual-process models of criminal decision making -- Personality and offender decision-making: the theoretical, empirical, and practical implications for criminology -- Temporal discounting, present orientation, and criminal deterrence -- The role of moral beliefs, shame, and guilt in criminal decision-making : an overview of theoretical trameworks and empirical results -- Neural mechanisms of criminal decision making in adolescence : the roles of executive functioning and empathy -- Social learner decision-making : matching theory as a unifying framework for recasting a general theory -- Victim selection -- Co-offending and co-offender selection -- Informal guardians and offender decision making -- Police and offender choices : a framework -- Crime location choice : state-of-the-art and avenues for future research -- High stakes: the role of weapons in offender decision-making -- The effect of alcohol and arousal on criminal decision making -- Emotions in offender decision making -- Experimental designs in the study of offender decision-making -- Observational methods of offender decision making -- Understanding offender decision making using surveys, interviews, and life event calendars -- Simulating crime event decision making : agent-based social simulations in criminology -- Modeling offender decision-making with secondary data -- "Deciding" to kill : understanding homicide offenders' decision-making -- Coldblooded and badass : a "hot/cool" approach to understanding carjackers' decisions -- The reasoning sex offender -- Burglary decisions -- Offender decision-making in corporate and white-collar crime -- Organized crime and protection rackets -- Appendix: research methods -- Notes -- Works cited -- Index

The prefrontal cortex makes up almost a quarter of the human brain, and it expanded dramatically during primate evolution. The Neurobiology of the Prefrontal Cortex presents a new theory about its fundamental function. In this important new book, the authors argue that primate-specific parts of the prefrontal cortex evolved to reduce errors in foraging choices, so that particular ancestors of modern humans could overcome periodic food shortages. These developments laid the foundation for working out problems in our imagination, which resulted in the insights that allow humans to avoid errors entirely, at least at times. In the book, the authors detail which parts of the prefrontal cortex evolved exclusively in primates, how its connections explain why the prefrontal cortex alone can perform its function, and why other parts of the brain cannot do what the prefrontal cortex does. Based on an analysis of its evolutionary history, the book uses evidence from lesion, imaging, and cell-recording experiments to argue that the primate prefrontal cortex generates goals from a current behavioural context and that it can do so on the basis of single events. As a result, the prefrontal cortex uses the attentive control of behaviour to augment an older general-purpose learning system, one that evolved very early in the history of animals. This older system learns slowly and cumulatively over many experiences based on reinforcement. The authors argue that a new learning system evolved in primates at a particular time and place in their history, that it did so to decrease the errors inherent in the older learning system, and that severe volatility of food resources provided the driving force for these developments. Written by two leading brain scientists, The Neurobiology of the Prefrontal Cortex is an important contribution to our understanding of the evolution and functioning of the human brain.