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The Sunk Cost Fallacy
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Download or read book Out of Love written by Hazel Hayes and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of E! News' 13 Books to Read This September | One of Bookish's Debuts to Read in the Second Half of 2021 | One of Medium's Best Releases Out Today “Hazel Hayes writes with such honesty and casual confidence and flowing dialogue, you feel you are overhearing it rather than reading it. The writing sparkles with wit and a poignant emotional reality. I love it.”—Matt Haig, bestselling author of The Midnight Library “A smart, touching, time-bending romance. Funny and affecting.”—David Nicholls, bestselling author of One Day and Sweet Sorrow For anyone who has loved and lost, and lived to tell the tale, this gorgeously written debut is a love story told in reverse, a modern novel with the heart of a classic: truthful, tragic, and ultimately full of hope. Out of Love begins at the end. A couple call it quits after nearly five years, and while holding a box of her ex-boyfriend’s belongings, the young woman wonders: How could they have spent so long together? When did they fall out of love? Were there good times before the bad? These are the questions we obsess over when a relationship ends, even when obsessing can do no good. But instead of moving forward through the emotional fallout of a break-up, Out of Love moves backward in time, weaving together an already unraveled tapestry, from tragic ending to magical first kiss. Each chapter jumps further into the past, mining their history for the days and details that might help us understand love; how it happens and why it sometimes falls apart. Readers of Normal People; Goodbye, Vitamin; and One Day will adore this bittersweet romance, a sparkling debut that you won’t want to miss.
Book Synopsis Logically Fallacious by : Bo Bennett
Download or read book Logically Fallacious written by Bo Bennett and published by eBookIt.com. This book was released on 2012-02-19 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a crash course in effective reasoning, meant to catapult you into a world where you start to see things how they really are, not how you think they are. The focus of this book is on logical fallacies, which loosely defined, are simply errors in reasoning. With the reading of each page, you can make significant improvements in the way you reason and make decisions. Logically Fallacious is one of the most comprehensive collections of logical fallacies with all original examples and easy to understand descriptions, perfect for educators, debaters, or anyone who wants to improve his or her reasoning skills. "Expose an irrational belief, keep a person rational for a day. Expose irrational thinking, keep a person rational for a lifetime." - Bo Bennett This 2021 Edition includes dozens of more logical fallacies with many updated examples.
Book Synopsis Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them by : Gary Belsky
Download or read book Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them written by Gary Belsky and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-12-26 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Protect and grow your finances with help from this definitive and practical guide to behavioral economics—revised and updated to reflect new economic realities. In their fascinating investigation of the ways we handle money, Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich reveal the psychological forces—the patterns of thinking and decision making—behind seemingly irrational behavior. They explain why so many otherwise savvy people make foolish financial choices: why investors are too quick to sell winning stocks and too slow to sell losing shares, why home sellers leave money on the table and home buyers don’t get the biggest bang for their buck, why borrowers pay too much credit card interest and savers can’t sock away as much as they’d like, and why so many of us can’t control our spending. Focusing on the decisions we make every day, Belsky and Gilovich provide invaluable guidance for avoiding the financial faux pas that can cost thousands of dollars each year. Filled with fresh insight; practical advice; and lively, illustrative anecdotes, this book gives you the tools you need to harness the powerful science of behavioral economics in any financial environment.
Download or read book Bad Arguments written by Robert Arp and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-10-29 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely and accessible guide to 100 of the most infamous logical fallacies in Western philosophy, helping readers avoid and detect false assumptions and faulty reasoning You’ll love this book or you’ll hate it. So, you’re either with us or against us. And if you’re against us then you hate books. No true intellectual would hate this book. Ever decide to avoid a restaurant because of one bad meal? Choose a product because a celebrity endorsed it? Or ignore what a politician says because she’s not a member of your party? For as long as people have been discussing, conversing, persuading, advocating, proselytizing, pontificating, or otherwise stating their case, their arguments have been vulnerable to false assumptions and faulty reasoning. Drawing upon a long history of logical falsehoods and philosophical flubs, Bad Arguments demonstrates how misguided arguments come to be, and what we can do to detect them in the rhetoric of others and avoid using them ourselves. Fallacies—or conclusions that don’t follow from their premise—are at the root of most bad arguments, but it can be easy to stumble into a fallacy without realizing it. In this clear and concise guide to good arguments gone bad, Robert Arp, Steven Barbone, and Michael Bruce take readers through 100 of the most infamous fallacies in Western philosophy, identifying the most common missteps, pitfalls, and dead-ends of arguments gone awry. Whether an instance of sunk costs, is ought, affirming the consequent, moving the goal post, begging the question, or the ever-popular slippery slope, each fallacy engages with examples drawn from contemporary politics, economics, media, and popular culture. Further diagrams and tables supplement entries and contextualize common errors in logical reasoning. At a time in our world when it is crucial to be able to identify and challenge rhetorical half-truths, this bookhelps readers to better understand flawed argumentation and develop logical literacy. Unrivaled in its breadth of coverage and a worthy companion to its sister volume Just the Arguments (2011), Bad Arguments is an essential tool for undergraduate students and general readers looking to hone their critical thinking and rhetorical skills.
Book Synopsis Economics of the Undead by : Glen Whitman
Download or read book Economics of the Undead written by Glen Whitman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether preparing us for economic recovery after the zombie apocalypse, analyzing vampire investment strategies, or illuminating the market forces that affect vampire-human romances, Economics of the Undead: Zombies, Vampires, and the Dismal Science gives both seasoned economists and layman readers something to sink their teeth into. Undead characters have terrified popular audiences for centuries, but when analyzed closely, their behaviors and stories—however farfetched—mirror our own in surprising ways. The essays collected in this book are as humorous as they are thoughtful, as culturally relevant as they are economically sound, and provide an accessible link between a popular culture phenomenon and the key concepts necessary to building one’s understanding of economic systems big and small. It is the first book to apply and combine economics and our society’s fascination with the undead, and is an invaluable resource for those looking to learn economic fundamentals in a fun and innovative way. Contributions by: Kyle William Bishop, Eleanor Brown, Ian Chadd, Darwynn Deyo, Steven Horwitz, Daniel Farhat, Jean-Baptiste Fleury, Enrique Guerra-Pujol, Brian Hollar, Sebastien Lecou, Joseph Mandarino, Alain Marciano, Fabien Medvecky, David T. Mitchell, Michael O’Hara, M. Christine Phillips, A. Lynn Phillips, G. Michael Phillips, Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Robert Prga, Hollis Robbins, Sarah Skwire, Ilya Somin, David Tufte, Mary Jo Tufte, and Charlotte Weil
Book Synopsis The Art of Thinking Clearly by : Rolf Dobelli
Download or read book The Art of Thinking Clearly written by Rolf Dobelli and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A world-class thinker counts the 100 ways in which humans behave irrationally, showing us what we can do to recognize and minimize these “thinking errors” to make better decisions and have a better life Despite the best of intentions, humans are notoriously bad—that is, irrational—when it comes to making decisions and assessing risks and tradeoffs. Psychologists and neuroscientists refer to these distinctly human foibles, biases, and thinking traps as “cognitive errors.” Cognitive errors are systematic deviances from rationality, from optimized, logical, rational thinking and behavior. We make these errors all the time, in all sorts of situations, for problems big and small: whether to choose the apple or the cupcake; whether to keep retirement funds in the stock market when the Dow tanks, or whether to take the advice of a friend over a stranger. The “behavioral turn” in neuroscience and economics in the past twenty years has increased our understanding of how we think and how we make decisions. It shows how systematic errors mar our thinking and under which conditions our thought processes work best and worst. Evolutionary psychology delivers convincing theories about why our thinking is, in fact, marred. The neurosciences can pinpoint with increasing precision what exactly happens when we think clearly and when we don’t. Drawing on this wide body of research, The Art of Thinking Clearly is an entertaining presentation of these known systematic thinking errors--offering guidance and insight into everything why you shouldn’t accept a free drink to why you SHOULD walk out of a movie you don’t like it to why it’s so hard to predict the future to why shouldn’t watch the news. The book is organized into 100 short chapters, each covering a single cognitive error, bias, or heuristic. Examples of these concepts include: Reciprocity, Confirmation Bias, The It-Gets-Better-Before-It-Gets-Worse Trap, and the Man-With-A-Hammer Tendency. In engaging prose and with real-world examples and anecdotes, The Art of Thinking Clearly helps solve the puzzle of human reasoning.
Book Synopsis The Skeptic's Dictionary by : Robert Carroll
Download or read book The Skeptic's Dictionary written by Robert Carroll and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wealth of evidence for doubters and disbelievers "Whether it's the latest shark cartilage scam, or some new 'repressed memory' idiocy that besets you, I suggest you carry a copy of this dictionary at all times, or at least have it within reach as first aid for psychic attacks. We need all the help we can get." -James Randi, President, James Randi Educational Foundation, randi.org "From alternative medicine, aliens, and psychics to the farthest shores of science and beyond, Robert Carroll presents a fascinating look at some of humanity's most strange and wonderful ideas. Refreshing and witty, both believers and unbelievers will find this compendium complete and captivating. Buy this book and feed your head!" -Clifford Pickover, author of The Stars of Heaven and Dreaming the Future "A refreshing compendium of clear thinking, a welcome and potent antidote to the reams of books on the supernatural and pseudoscientific." -John Allen Paulos, author of Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper "This book covers an amazing range of topics and can protect many people from being scammed." -Stephen Barrett, M.D., quackwatch.org Featuring close to 400 definitions, arguments, and essays on topics ranging from acupuncture to zombies, The Skeptic's Dictionary is a lively, commonsense trove of detailed information on all things supernatural, occult, paranormal, and pseudoscientific. It covers such categories as alternative medicine; cryptozoology; extraterrestrials and UFOs; frauds and hoaxes; junk science; logic and perception; New Age energy; and the psychic. For the open-minded seeker, the soft or hardened skeptic, and the believing doubter, this book offers a remarkable range of information that puts to the test the best arguments of true believers.
Book Synopsis The Biggest Bluff by : Maria Konnikova
Download or read book The Biggest Bluff written by Maria Konnikova and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller • A New York Times Notable Book “The tale of how Konnikova followed a story about poker players and wound up becoming a story herself will have you riveted, first as you learn about her big winnings, and then as she conveys the lessons she learned both about human nature and herself.” —The Washington Post It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him to be her mentor. But she knew her man: a famously thoughtful and broad-minded player, he was intrigued by her pitch that she wasn't interested in making money so much as learning about life. She had faced a stretch of personal bad luck, and her reflections on the role of chance had led her to a giant of game theory, who pointed her to poker as the ultimate master class in learning to distinguish between what can be controlled and what can't. And she certainly brought something to the table, including a Ph.D. in psychology and an acclaimed and growing body of work on human behavior and how to hack it. So Seidel was in, and soon she was down the rabbit hole with him, into the wild, fiercely competitive, overwhelmingly masculine world of high-stakes Texas Hold'em, their initial end point the following year's World Series of Poker. But then something extraordinary happened. Under Seidel's guidance, Konnikova did have many epiphanies about life that derived from her new pursuit, including how to better read, not just her opponents but far more importantly herself; how to identify what tilted her into an emotional state that got in the way of good decisions; and how to get to a place where she could accept luck for what it was, and what it wasn't. But she also began to win. And win. In a little over a year, she began making earnest money from tournaments, ultimately totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. She won a major title, got a sponsor, and got used to being on television, and to headlines like "How one writer's book deal turned her into a professional poker player." She even learned to like Las Vegas. But in the end, Maria Konnikova is a writer and student of human behavior, and ultimately the point was to render her incredible journey into a container for its invaluable lessons. The biggest bluff of all, she learned, is that skill is enough. Bad cards will come our way, but keeping our focus on how we play them and not on the outcome will keep us moving through many a dark patch, until the luck once again breaks our way.
Book Synopsis Rationally Speaking by : Massimo Pigliucci
Download or read book Rationally Speaking written by Massimo Pigliucci and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays by Professor Massimo Pigliucci (currently at Stony Brook University in new York), on topics ranging from science to philosophy, from politics to religion. Rationally Speaking originated in 2000 as a monthly online column, eventually to be syndicated on more than 50 web sites worldwide. It was the beginning of a regular online presence, which evolved in 2006 into the more agile and open-ended form of a blog (rationallyspeaking.org). Why would a professional scientist who spends most of his time working on fairly specific scientific puzzles concerning gene-environment interactions (what is often referred to as "nature-nurture" questions) spend a considerable amount of time and emotional energy writing electronic "messages in a bottle" to be entrusted to the capricious currents of the Internet?Because Pigliucci firmly believes that academics have a duty to society to be public intellectuals. Of course, the word "intellectual" has, at best, a dubious reputation in the United States (as opposed to Europe, where it is not uncommon to see philosophers, sociologists and scientists appearing on tv talk shows). Indeed, anti-intellectualism as a phenomenon characteristic of American society almost from its inception, has been the object of much study by sociologists who have identified its various components (from disdain for "theoretical" pursuits because they are not in line with the capitalist ethos to religious fundamentalist attacks on evolution). Nonetheless, and indeed precisely because of the widespread anti-intellectualism, the U.S. desperately needs intellectuals, from the academic world as much from outside of it (artists, journalists, authors, etc.).Democracy, Winston Churchill once said, is the worst form of government except for every other one. Plato wasn't a friend of democratic government, especially after he saw the Athenian democracy kill his mentor, Socrates. If we want to have a truly liberal democracy, and not the kind of mob rule that Plato disdained, we need educated people. Education, in turn, is not just an accumulation of factual knowledge, nor is it the acquisition of skills useful to the large corporations who now run the world. It is, at its essence, the ability to think critically about anything that is relevant to our lives. We hope, therefore, that you will enjoy these essays in the spirit they were written, to provide good food for thinking and further discussion.
Book Synopsis That's Not How We Do It Here! by : John Kotter
Download or read book That's Not How We Do It Here! written by John Kotter and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What’s the worst thing you can hear when you have a good idea at work? “That’s not how we do it here!” In their iconic bestseller Our Iceberg Is Melting, John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber used a simple fable about penguins to explain the process of leading people through major changes. Now, ten years later, they’re back with another must-read story that will help any team or organization cope with their biggest challenges and turn them into exciting opportunities. Once upon a time a clan of meerkats lived in the Kalahari, a region in southern Africa. After years of steady growth, a drought has sharply reduced the clan’s resources, and deadly vulture attacks have increased. As things keep getting worse, the harmony of the clan is shattered. The executive team quarrels about possible solutions, and suggestions from frontline workers face a soul-crushing response: “That’s not how we do it here!” So Nadia, a bright and adventurous meerkat, hits the road in search of new ideas to help her troubled clan. She discovers a much smaller group that operates very differently, with much more teamwork and agility. These meerkats have developed innovative solutions to find food and evade the vultures. But not everything in this small clan is as perfect as it seems at first. Can Nadia figure out how to combine the best of both worlds—a large, disciplined, well-managed clan and a small, informal, inspiring clan—before it’s too late? This book distills Kotter’s decades of experience and award-winning research to reveal why organizations rise and fall, and how they can rise again in the face of adversity.
Download or read book Powerful written by Patty McCord and published by Tom Rath. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named by The Washington Post as one of the 11 Leadership Books to Read in 2018 When it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams, Patty McCord says most companies have it all wrong. McCord helped create the unique and high-performing culture at Netflix, where she was chief talent officer. In her new book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, she shares what she learned there and elsewhere in Silicon Valley. McCord advocates practicing radical honesty in the workplace, saying good-bye to employees who don’t fit the company’s emerging needs, and motivating with challenging work, not promises, perks, and bonus plans. McCord argues that the old standbys of corporate HR—annual performance reviews, retention plans, employee empowerment and engagement programs—often end up being a colossal waste of time and resources. Her road-tested advice, offered with humor and irreverence, provides readers a different path for creating a culture of high performance and profitability. Powerful will change how you think about work and the way a business should be run.
Download or read book Designed for Use written by Lukas Mathis and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. This book was released on 2016-04-07 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is for designers, developers, and product managers who are charged with what sometimes seems like an impossible task: making sure products work the way your users expect them to. You'll find out how to design applications and websites that people will not only use, but will absolutely love. The second edition brings the book up to date and expands it with three completely new chapters. Interaction design - the way the apps on our phones work, the way we enter a destination into our car's GPS - is becoming more and more important. Identify and fix bad software design by making usability the cornerstone of your design process. Lukas weaves together hands-on techniques and fundamental concepts. Each technique chapter explains a specific approach you can use to make your product more user friendly, such as storyboarding, usability tests, and paper prototyping. Idea chapters are concept-based: how to write usable text, how realistic your designs should look, when to use animations. This new edition is updated and expanded with new chapters covering requirements gathering, how the design of data structures influences the user interface, and how to do design work as a team. Through copious illustrations and supporting psychological research, expert developer and user interface designer Lukas Mathis gives you a deep dive into research, design, and implementation--the essential stages in designing usable interfaces for applications and websites. Lukas inspires you to look at design in a whole new way, explaining exactly what to look for - and what to avoid - in creating products that get people excited.
Book Synopsis Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by : Richard H. Thaler
Download or read book Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics written by Richard H. Thaler and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-05-11 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Get ready to change the way you think about economics. Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans—predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth—and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world. Traditional economics assumes rational actors. Early in his research, Thaler realized these Spock-like automatons were nothing like real people. Whether buying a clock radio, selling basketball tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. In other words, we misbehave. More importantly, our misbehavior has serious consequences. Dismissed at first by economists as an amusing sideshow, the study of human miscalculations and their effects on markets now drives efforts to make better decisions in our lives, our businesses, and our governments. Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behavior, Thaler enlightens readers about how to make smarter decisions in an increasingly mystifying world. He reveals how behavioral economic analysis opens up new ways to look at everything from household finance to assigning faculty offices in a new building, to TV game shows, the NFL draft, and businesses like Uber. Laced with antic stories of Thaler’s spirited battles with the bastions of traditional economic thinking, Misbehaving is a singular look into profound human foibles. When economics meets psychology, the implications for individuals, managers, and policy makers are both profound and entertaining. Shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Download or read book Quit written by Annie Duke and published by Noura Books. This book was released on 2022-06-13 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dalam berbagai situasi, kita sering kali dihadapkan dengan pilihan sulit: bertahan, berubah arah, atau bahkan berhenti (quit). Nyatanya, walau banyak pertanda tak ada guna untuk tetap bertahan, berhenti identik dengan kata gagal, sehingga tak pernah jadi pilihan. Annie Duke menawarkan strategi berbasis sains yang dapat mengasah keterampilan untuk mengetahui kapan kita harus memilih berhenti dan bagaimana cara melakukannya. Saat Anda sedang menghadapi permasalahan bisnis, karier, atau bahkan hubungan pribadi, piawai dalam memilih mana hal yang harus dipertahankan atau tidak dapat membantu Anda untuk menentukan langkah terbaik berikutnya. Hidup ini singkat. Tak sepatutnya kita membuang waktu, energi, atau uang karena terus mempertahankan keputusan yang salah."
Book Synopsis Rational Choice in an Uncertain World by : Reid Hastie
Download or read book Rational Choice in an Uncertain World written by Reid Hastie and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2010 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Second Edition of Rational Choice in an Uncertain World the authors compare the basic principles of rationality with actual behaviour in making decisions. They describe theories and research findings from the field of judgment and decision making in a non-technical manner, using anecdotes as a teaching device. Intended as an introductory textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, the material not only is of scholarly interest but is practical as well. The Second Edition includes: - more coverage on the role of emotions, happiness, and general well-being in decisions - a summary of the new research on the neuroscience of decision processes - more discussion of the adaptive value of (non-rational heuristics) - expansion of the graphics for decision trees, probability trees, and Venn diagrams.
Book Synopsis Bulletproof Problem Solving by : Charles Conn
Download or read book Bulletproof Problem Solving written by Charles Conn and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complex problem solving is the core skill for 21st Century Teams Complex problem solving is at the very top of the list of essential skills for career progression in the modern world. But how problem solving is taught in our schools, universities, businesses and organizations comes up short. In Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything you’ll learn the seven-step systematic approach to creative problem solving developed in top consulting firms that will work in any field or industry, turning you into a highly sought-after bulletproof problem solver who can tackle challenges that others balk at. The problem-solving technique outlined in this book is based on a highly visual, logic-tree method that can be applied to everything from everyday decisions to strategic issues in business to global social challenges. The authors, with decades of experience at McKinsey and Company, provide 30 detailed, real-world examples, so you can see exactly how the technique works in action. With this bulletproof approach to defining, unpacking, understanding, and ultimately solving problems, you’ll have a personal superpower for developing compelling solutions in your workplace. Discover the time-tested 7-step technique to problem solving that top consulting professionals employ Learn how a simple visual system can help you break down and understand the component parts of even the most complex problems Build team brainstorming techniques that fight cognitive bias, streamline workplanning, and speed solutions Know when and how to employ modern analytic tools and techniques from machine learning to game theory Learn how to structure and communicate your findings to convince audiences and compel action The secrets revealed in Bulletproof Problem Solving will transform the way you approach problems and take you to the next level of business and personal success.
Book Synopsis Principles of Synthetic Intelligence by : Joscha Bach
Download or read book Principles of Synthetic Intelligence written by Joscha Bach and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-06 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Foreword: "In this book Joscha Bach introduces Dietrich Dörner's PSI architecture and Joscha's implementation of the MicroPSI architecture. These architectures and their implementation have several lessons for other architectures and models. Most notably, the PSI architecture includes drives and thus directly addresses questions of emotional behavior. An architecture including drives helps clarify how emotions could arise. It also changes the way that the architecture works on a fundamental level, providing an architecture more suited for behaving autonomously in a simulated world. PSI includes three types of drives, physiological (e.g., hunger), social (i.e., affiliation needs), and cognitive (i.e., reduction of uncertainty and expression of competency). These drives routinely influence goal formation and knowledge selection and application. The resulting architecture generates new kinds of behaviors, including context dependent memories, socially motivated behavior, and internally motivated task switching. This architecture illustrates how emotions and physical drives can be included in an embodied cognitive architecture. The PSI architecture, while including perceptual, motor, learning, and cognitive processing components, also includes several novel knowledge representations: temporal structures, spatial memories, and several new information processing mechanisms and behaviors, including progress through types of knowledge sources when problem solving (the Rasmussen ladder), and knowledge-based hierarchical active vision. These mechanisms and representations suggest ways for making other architectures more realistic, more accurate, and easier to use. The architecture is demonstrated in the Island simulated environment. While it may look like a simple game, it was carefully designed to allow multiple tasks to be pursued and provides ways to satisfy the multiple drives. It would be useful in its own right for developing other architectures interested in multi-tasking, long-term learning, social interaction, embodied architectures, and related aspects of behavior that arise in a complex but tractable real-time environment. The resulting models are not presented as validated cognitive models, but as theoretical explorations in the space of architectures for generating behavior. The sweep of the architecture can thus be larger-it presents a new cognitive architecture attempting to provide a unified theory of cognition. It attempts to cover perhaps the largest number of phenomena to date. This is not a typical cognitive modeling work, but one that I believe that we can learn much from." --Frank E. Ritter, Series Editor Although computational models of cognition have become very popular, these models are relatively limited in their coverage of cognition-- they usually only emphasize problem solving and reasoning, or treat perception and motivation as isolated modules. The first architecture to cover cognition more broadly is PSI theory, developed by Dietrich Dorner. By integrating motivation and emotion with perception and reasoning, and including grounded neuro-symbolic representations, PSI contributes significantly to an integrated understanding of the mind. It provides a conceptual framework that highlights the relationships between perception and memory, language and mental representation, reasoning and motivation, emotion and cognition, autonomy and social behavior. It is, however, unfortunate that PSI's origin in psychology, its methodology, and its lack of documentation have limited its impact. The proposed book adapts Psi theory to cognitive science and artificial intelligence, by elucidating both its theoretical and technical frameworks, and clarifying its contribution to how we have come to understand cognition.
