Table of Contents

[click on blue, underlined words and you will be taken direct to the relevant section in my text]

1. Introduction
   1. In defence of cognitive psychology
   2. What's in the book & how may it be used?
2. Chapter One: Some basic neurology. (The basics of brain structure and function.)
   1. Our nervous system – main structures
      1. Neurons & connections – is the brain infinite?
      2. Brainstem/midbrain, forebrain, cerebellum, cerebral cortex, limbic system, thalamus, hippocampus (affect & learned helplessness)
   2. Our Two Brains (& the corpus callosum)
      1. Crossed laterality / brain dominance
      2. Brain scans (& their limitations)
      3. Broca & Wernicke – their areas & their aphasias
   3. Cerebral cortex– structure & function
      1. White & grey matter, columns & modules
      2. Spreading activation & association
      3. Information processing
   4. Summary
3. Chapter Two: Language management (How we understand and produce language - & see chapter three.)
   1. Neuroanatomy, neuropsychology & literacy
   2. Mental lexicons (auditory, semantic & visual)
   3. Understanding speech: From sound to meaning
      1. Figure 2.1 Language management in the left brain
      2. Auditory association – phonemes & speech association
      3. Phonemic code & the auditory input lexicon
      4. Semantic code, the semantic lexicon & language association
   4. Understanding text: From symbol to meaning
      1. Visual association – graphemes & symbol association
      2. Graphemic code & the visual input lexicon
      3. Direct vs. assembled reading – a taster of the “reading wars” debate
      4. Secondary activation & the dual route stratagem
   5. Speaking and writing: from meaning to sound or symbol. Modelling and logic
   6. Spreading activation
      1. Parallel distributed processing (PDP). The power of minds
   7. Top-down and bottom-up processing. Bottom-up processing. Top-down processing.
      1. The proactive mind
   8. Cascading feature analysis. Cascading feature analysis / feature analysis in cascade.
      1. The joy of fuzzy feature recognition
      2. Interactive-compensatory reading
   9. Experimental cognitive psychology (& the act of reading)