Advances in Psychological Science, Volume 2

Book excerpt: The chapters in this volume are the edited versions of invited addresses to the XXVI International Congress of Psychology held in Montréal in August 1996. As one major goal of the Congress was to promote communication among specializations in scientific psychology, the speakers were asked to survey their research area and present their own work in a way that would be accessible to their colleagues in other areas. Another purpose of the meeting was to bring researchers together from different parts of the world, reflecting their different approaches to the scientific study of mind, brain, and behavior. Consequently, the eminent researchers who have written the twenty-six chapters included in the present volume were drawn from universities and research institutes in North America, Europe, Japan, Russia, Israel, and New Zealand. The chapters cover a range of topics in human and animal experimental psychology. The first section deals with psychobiological processes - the interplay of body and mind in determining intelligence, stress, and pain. The next five chapters address current issues in neuropsychology and neuroscience, including the neural correlates of attention and vision. A third section looks at learning processes in humans and animals, and a fourth deals with a range of topics in perception and cognition. The final five chapters take a developmental perspective, presenting theoretical and empirical analyses of the acquisition of perceptual and cognitive abilities. Overall, the collection illustrates the growing trend to break down traditional barriers between areas of experimental psychology; there are many instances of profitable interactions between researchers studying aspects of behavior and those studying the biological bases of these behaviors. The twenty-six chapters give an excellent overview of current research in scientific psychology.