This book describes a novel methodology for studying algorithmic skills, intended as cognitive activities related to rule-based symbolic transformation, and argues that some human computational abilities may be interpreted and analyzed as genuine examples of extended cognition. It shows that the performance of these abilities relies not only on innate neurocognitive systems or language-related skills, but also on external tools and general agent–environment interactions. Further, it asserts that a low-level analysis, based on a set of core neurocognitive systems linking numbers and language, is not sufficient to explain some specific forms of high-level numerical skills, like those involved in algorithm execution. To this end, it reports on the design of a cognitive architecture for modeling all the relevant features involved in the execution of algorithmic strategies, including external tools, such as paper and pencils. The first part of the book discusses the philosophical premises for endorsing and justifying a position in philosophy of mind that links a modified form of computationalism with some recent theoretical and scientific developments, like those introduced by the so-called dynamical approach to cognition. The second part is dedicated to the description of a Turing-machine-inspired cognitive architecture, expressly designed to formalize all kinds of algorithmic strategies.

Computational Organizational Cognition presents simulations to clearly assess the advantages of agent-based computational organizational cognition (AOC) for both theory and practice, demonstrating how AOC is an essential instrument to explore, understand and analyze the inner complexities of organizational cognition.

This book discusses how scientific and other types of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important and innovative changes in theories and concepts. Gathering revised contributions presented at the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR18), held on October 24–26 2018 in Seville, Spain, the book is divided into three main parts. The first focuses on models, reasoning, and representation. It highlights key theoretical concepts from an applied perspective, and addresses issues concerning information visualization, experimental methods, and design. The second part goes a step further, examining abduction, problem solving, and reasoning. The respective papers assess different types of reasoning, and discuss various concepts of inference and creativity and their relationship with experimental data. In turn, the third part reports on a number of epistemological and technological issues. By analyzing possible contradictions in modern research and describing representative case studies, this part is intended to foster new discussions and stimulate new ideas. All in all, the book provides researchers and graduate students in the fields of applied philosophy, epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence alike with an authoritative snapshot of the latest theories and applications of model-based reasoning.

Film Music: Cognition to Interpretation explores the dynamic counterpoint between a film’s soundtrack, its visuals and narrative, and the audience’s perception and construction of meaning. Adopting a holistic approach covering both the humanities and the sciences—blending cognitive psychology, musical analysis, behavioral neuroscience, semiotics, linguistics, and other related fields—the author examines the perceptual and cognitive processes that elicit musical meaning in film and breathe life into our cinematic experiences. A clear and engaging writing style distills complex concepts, theories, and analytical methodologies into explanations accessible to readers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, making it an indispensable companion for scholars and students of music, film studies, and cognition. Across ten chapters, extensive appendices, and hundreds of film references, Film Music: Cognition to Interpretation offers a new mode of analysis, inviting readers to unlock a deeper understanding of the expressive power of film music.

This book contains the proceedings of the Sixth National Conference of the Italian Systems Society. The title, Towards a post-Bertalanffy Systemics, aims to underline the need for Systemics and Systems Science to generalize theoretically concepts related to complexity (the great enemy of Bertalanffy Systemics). Hopefully this goal should be achieved by working in an inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary fashion, using systemic concepts arising from various disciplines and from the original, or Bertalanffy Systemics, as well. The interdisciplinary nature of the original Systemics and its power of generalization were given, overall, by the fact that the problems and solutions of one discipline become problems and solutions for another. Today, the modeling and interpretation of multidisciplinary approaches and representations makes easier to recognize these interconnections. The context, however, has changed dramatically. Of course, the challenge is still to find theoretical generalizations and applications, even where we have a lot of specificities, but we know very little on how to combine them. We cannot, however, simply replace the old with the new, but we must introduce strategies to recognize, represent, model and act on new levels, combining multiple representations, functions and emergence. In many disciplines this has been already done, and inevitably well, since targets and projects are well specified and oriented. The challenge is to do it for Systemics, with the vocations of cultural and theoretical generalization. Examples of new issues introduced by such theoretical disciplinary improvements, dealt with by many disciplines, include the study of mesoscopic or middle-way level, of multiple and dynamic coherence, of equivalence/non-equivalence, of fractality, of networks, of non-causality, of non-invasiveness, of non-prescribability, of non-separability, of quasi properties, of symmetry properties, of topological dynamics, as well as of quantum theories and concepts. The conference was devoted to identifying, discussing and understanding possible interrelationships of theoretical disciplinary improvements, recognized as having prospective fundamental roles for a new post-Bertalanffy Systemics. The latter should be able to deal with problems related to complexity in a generalized way. In this context the inter-disciplinarity should consists, for instance, in a disciplinary reformulation of problems, as from algebraic to geometrical, from military to political, from biological to chemical, while the trans-disciplinarity should be related to the study of such reformulations and their properties. The Italian Systems Society (AIRS) was founded in the 1996. The AIRS is a network of academicians, scientists, researchers and professionals involved in Systemics. A partial list of disciplines represented is: Architecture Biology Economics Education Engineering Mathematics Neurosciences Medicine Music Philosophy Psychology Physics. Previous conferences had as open lecturers professors Arecchi, Haken, Klir, and Kauffman. The proceedings have been published as: 1. Minati, G., (ed.), (1998), Proceedings of the first Italian Conference on Systemics, Apogeo Scientifica, Milan, Italy. 2. Minati, G., and Pessa, E., (eds.) (2002), Emergence in Complex Cognitive, Social and Biological Systems. Kluwer, New York. 3. Minati, G., Pessa, E., and Abram, M., (eds.), (2006), Systemics of Emergence: Research and Applications. Springer, New York. 4. Minati, G., Abram, M. and Pessa, E., (eds.), (2009), Processes of emergence of systems and systemic properties. Towards a general theory of emergence. World Scientific, Singapore. 5. Minati, G., Abram, M. and Pessa, E., (eds.), (2012), Methods, Models, simulations and approaches - towards a general theory of change. World Scientific, Singapore.

With the ongoing development of algorithmic composition programs and communities of practice expanding, algorithmic music faces a turning point. Joining dozens of emerging and established scholars alongside leading practitioners in the field, chapters in this Handbook both describe the state of algorithmic composition and also set the agenda for critical research on and analysis of algorithmic music. Organized into four sections, chapters explore the music's history, utility, community, politics, and potential for mass consumption. Contributors address such issues as the role of algorithms as co-performers, live coding practices, and discussions of the algorithmic culture as it currently exists and what it can potentially contribute society, education, and ecommerce. Chapters engage particularly with post-human perspectives - what new musics are now being found through algorithmic means which humans could not otherwise have made - and, in reciprocation, how algorithmic music is being assimilated back into human culture and what meanings it subsequently takes. Blending technical, artistic, cultural, and scientific viewpoints, this Handbook positions algorithmic music making as an essentially human activity.

The step-by-step guide to administering, scoring, and interpreting the WJ IV® Tests of Cognitive Abilities Essentials of WJ IV® Cognitive Abilities Assessment provides expert, practical advice on how to administer, score, and interpret the WJ IV COG®. Designed to be an easy-to-use reference, the text goes beyond the information found in the WJ IV® examiner's manual to offer full explanations of the tests and clusters on the WJ IV COG®. This essential guide also explains the meaning of all scores and interpretive features and includes valuable advice on clinical applications and illuminating case studies. This clearly written and easily accessible resource offers: Concise chapters with numerous callout boxes highlighting key concepts, numerous examples, and test questions that help you gauge and reinforce your grasp of the information covered. An in-depth chapter on interpretation of the WJ IV COG® which highlights links to interventions for each test based on contemporary theory and research. Expert assessment of the tests' relative strengths and weaknesses. Illustrative case reports with clinical and school-based populations. If you're a school psychologist, clinical psychologist, neuropsychologist, or any professional or graduate student looking to become familiar with the new WJ IV COG®, this is the definitive resource you'll turn to again and again.

Cognition Beyond the Brain challenges neurocentrism by advocating a systemic view of cognition based on investigating how action shapes the experience of thinking. The systemic view steers between extended functionalism and enactivism by stressing how living beings connect bodies, technologies, language and culture. Since human thinking depends on a cultural ecology, people connect biologically-based powers with extended systems and, by so doing, they constitute cognitive systems that reach across the skin. Biological interpretation exploits extended functional systems. Illustrating distributed cognition, one set of chapters focus on computer mediated trust, work at a construction site, judgement aggregation and crime scene investigation. Turning to how bodies manufacture skills, the remaining chapters focus on interactivity or sense-saturated coordination. The feeling of doing is crucial to solving maths problems, learning about X rays, finding an invoice number, or launching a warhead in a film. People both participate in extended systems and exert individual responsibility. Brains manufacture a now to which selves are anchored: people can act automatically or, at times, vary habits and choose to author actions. In ontogenesis, a systemic view permits rationality to be seen as gaining mastery over world-side resources. Much evidence and argument thus speaks for reconnecting the study of computation, interactivity and human artifice. Taken together, this can drive a networks revolution that gives due cognitive importance to the perceivable world that lies beyond the brain. Cognition Beyond the Brain is a valuable reference for researchers, practitioners and graduate students within the fields of Computer Science, Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Science.

Based on a clear physical definition of the Mind given in the previous volume of the “Symphony of Matter and Mind” series, the author begins to formulate a unified concept of the Brain and Mind which will be developed in this and subsequent volumes. All mental phenomena, from basic sensory-motor to higher abstract-verbal, are the result of neural encoding of the external world signals and internal bodily signals into representations constituting the model of reality for the purpose of controlling the body and adapting to this reality. Thus, any theory of the brain faces the question of the nature of the neural code which could explain the observed speed and efficiency, scope and complexity of the computational process that we call the Mind. The mainstream theories of neuroscience that consider neural activity as trains of discrete identical spikes (various firing rate coding and temporal coding models) contradict the reality of the information density of neural computing. That is why, despite huge efforts by generations of researchers, this approach did not lead to deciphering the neural code. We know the details of the neural processes down to the molecular level but the brain remains a ‘black box’ that we cannot read. It is the outcome of the wrong theoretical assumption that should be revised. The author creates the concept of a neural code that overcomes the shortcomings of old models. There is another problem that cannot be avoided by any theory of consciousness. It is not enough to say that the brain creates the psyche as this leaves an explanatory gap. We need to show how this physiological system generates mental phenomena physically. The Mind is a technological process that works according to a certain algorithm based on physical laws. The author’s theory offers a fundamentally new approach to the nervous system that bridges physiology and psychology by illuminating the algorithm and the physics of the Mind from the intracellular to the system-wide level.

"This book presents a framework for teaching that empowers students, fosters literacy development, and explains the underlying factors that influence pedagogy, highlighting practices from around the globe"--