The working mind : meaning and mental attention in human development

• Main Authors: Pascual-Leone, Juan, Johnson, Janice M
• Format: eBook Book
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge The MIT Press 2021; MIT Press
• Edition: 1
• Series: The MIT Press
• Subjects: abstraction; accommodation; affect and emotion processes; affects a; automatic inhibition; automatic or effortless attention; Biology, life sciences; causal theories; Child, developmental and lifespan psychology; chimpanzees' symbols; Cognition; cognitive development; cognitive neuropsychology; cognitive versus affective schemes; consciousness; consciousness in infants; constructivism; constructivist learning; Developmental psychology; developmental stages; dialectical constructivism; dialectics; distal versus proximal object; emergence of symbolic function; endogenous; epistemology; equilibration; executive schemes; expectancies; facilitating versus misleading situations; figurative schemes; functional invariants; hierarchical reinforcement learning; iconic versus indexical function; intelligence; intentionality; internal field factor; learning paradox; Life sciences: general issues; M-power versus M-demand trade-off; Mathematics and Science; mediation; mental; mental attention; mental flow; mental or effortful attention; mental processes in infancy; mental-attention in infancy; misleading versus facilitating situations; neoPiagetian theory; Neurosciences; object permanence; operative schemes; or executive attention; overdetermination; Piagetian conservation; processing complexity; Psychology; reality resistances; reflective abstraction; resistances; scheme learning; schemes; schemes or schemas; semiotics; sensorimotor stages; sensorimotor versus symbolic executives; signalic versus symbolic function; signals versus symbols; Society and Social Sciences; Task analysis; task analysis of infancy tasks; task analysis of symbolic processes; theory of constructive operators; theory of development; theory of mind; type-1 versus type-2 thinking; types of schemes; working memory
• ISBN: 9780262045551; 0262045559; 9780262363082; 0262363089

A general organismic-causal theory that explicates working memory and executive function developmentally, clarifying the nature of human intelligence. In The Working Mind, Juan Pascual-Leone and Janice M. Johnson propose a general organismic-causal theory that explicates working memory and executive function developmentally and by doing so clarifies the nature of human intelligence. Pascual-Leone and Johnson explain “from within” (that is, from a subject's own processing perspective) cognitive developmental stages of growth, describing key causal factors that can account for the emergence of the working mind as a functional totality. Among these factors is a maturationally growing mental attention. After reviewing meaning-driven processes and constructivist knowledge principles that underlie what Pascual-Leone and Johnson term their Theory of Constructive Operators (TCO), they propose the TCO as as a developmental and neuropsychological approach to human cognitive and affective processes and their development. They present a novel method of mental task analysis that generates from-within process models of subjects' attempts to solve specific tasks. They provide an interpretation of brain semiotic processes that deploys TCO in functionally distinct brain locations. Finally, they show how TCO explicates complex human issues including consciousness, the self, the will, motivation, and individual differences, with applications in education, psychotherapy, and cognitive neuropsychology.