Review of Foundations of Cognitive Science

nization was a good idea because it helps to reduce repetition of the concepts provided in the earlier part on foundations. However, a number of issues are repeated across chapters, and it is not clear that the authors of each chapter had a chance to read the other chapters while they wrote theirs. The different parts of the book could have been better (more explicitly) named; for example, domains on its own means little to me! The book has an advantage in that it provides a collection of chapters on the foundations of cognitive science written by different people; hence, we see differing points of view from experts in given areas, which could not be achieved by a single author. What the book gains in variety, it Here we have a large book with a set of chapters written by different people on the foundations of cognitive science that is meant to answer the question, “What is cognitive science?” The book does answer the question, in so far as it can in such a young field, by providing a range of chapters tackling cognitive science from different points of view. Eric Wanner, Jerome Feldman, Michael Gazaniga, S. Kosslyn, and Geoffrey Hinton all give the book strong positive vindication on its cover flaps. Michael Posner’s book was initiated when a board of editors met in St. Louis, Missouri, to outline the chapters needed to carry out the project, which was funded by a generous grant from the Sloan Foundation. Posner does not include a chapter himself, although he provides a short preface. He might have included a signature on the preface because it is the norm; otherwise, it leaves the reader wondering whether he wrote it. The book has an introductory chapter on foundations by Herbert Simon and Craig Kaplan and is then split into three parts: (1) foundations (7 chapters), (2) domains (11 chapters), and (3) assessment (2 chapters). It also includes an author and subject index. The foundations of cognitive science cover computing, symbolic architectures, connectionism, grammatical theory, logic and semantics, experimental methods, and mind-brain-body issues. These foundations are then applied in the next part to the central cognitive domains of language acquisition, reading, discourse, mental models, categories and induction, problem solving, vision, visual attention memory, action, and motor control. Finally, there are assessments focusing on cultural and philosophical issues. I think that this orgaviewpoints on foundations or other issues when we have books with mainly U.S., or mainly European, papers. What I like to see is more international volumes with a balanced set of multicultural views from the United States, Europe, and Asia. This goes back to Roy D’Andrade’s chapter, which considers the importance of cultural cognition, where crosscultural experiments on color and emotion show that people from different cultures see things from different points of view. He argues that the reasoning that people do depends on cultural models. To my mind, some of the chapters indulge in lots of talk without any clear detail or data. I found that Daniel Schacter’s chapter on memory was too full of references to other work and had little of his own discussion; it is more useful as a bibliographic listing. However, the chapter by Terrence Sejnowski and Patricia Churchland differs from many of the others in that it gives detailed pictures of brain biology and results from brain experiments that I found refreshing. Also, they emphasized crossdisciplinary work in their conclusions, which I believe is important. In fact, there is evidence that much of science in the next century will involve engineering and integration as subfields converge (see Horgan [1996]). E. Bizzi and F. A. Mussa-Ivaldi’s chapter on motor control is also detailed with pictures of experimental results on kinematic data, torque stiffness, and trajectories for human and animal motor control. Something that I found strange is that there are running footers, rather than headers, marking chapters. I think this is the first time I have seen this approach, and initially, I thought there were no headings at all. I wonder if there was a specific reason for this format; otherwise, I think it would have been better to have running headers. In addition, there are lots of cross-references across chapters, but I would like to have seen more detailed references listing specific pages. Each chapter has a full list of references, but there are lots of references repeated over chapters. Maybe more space could have been saved, Review of Foundations of Cognitive Science