Theo Todman's Book Collection (Book-Paper Abstracts)

Cover Blurb (Outer)

1. What is the nature of human thought? According to a widely accepted view, human beings are endowed with a general set of reasoning abilities with which they approach any cognitive task, whatever its specific content, whether it involves solving mathematical problems, learning natural languages, calculating the meaning of kinship terms, or categorizing disease concepts. In contrast to this view, a growing number of researchers have concluded that many cognitive abilities are specialized to handle specific types of information. In short, much of human cognition is domain specific.
2. Psychologists with concerns ranging from animal learning to emergent theories of mind and body, cognitive scientists exploring problem solving and expertise, anthropologists working with color terms and folk taxonomies, psycholinguists investigating auditory perception, and philosophers examining reasoning schemata have concluded — often independently — that humans simply could not learn what they do know in a purely domain-neutral fashion.
3. Mapping The Mind presents the wealth of current research that has resulted from this multidisciplinary exploration of domains such as naive biology, psychology and physics, number and music, cosmology, religious, moral, and other social beliefs, and emotion concepts.
4. The contributors examine a number of theoretical questions, including how theory-like is domain knowledge, the nature of domain-guided conceptual change and knowledge transfer, the biological and evolutionary nature of domain-specific skills, and the implications of a domain-specific perspective for education.