Cognitive Interfaces

This book brings new perspectives to bear on the the architecture of the mind and the relationship between language and cognition. It considers how information is linked in the mind between different cognitive and expressive levels - so that people can, for example, talk about what they see and act upon what they hear - and how these linkages are and need to be constrained. The book is concerned in particular with the perception and representation of spatial structure.

In the opening chapter the editors address the general issues underlying current research and set each chapter in context. The book is then divided into four parts. The first two discuss the properties of the conceptual to syntactic structure interface and the conceptual to spatial structure interface. Part three examines constraints on the lexical interface and the different kinds of cognitive information in word representations. Part four considers how the neural architecture of the brain constrains mapping relations between different kinds of cognitive information.

The authors are psychologists and linguists. They show the insights that can be gained from the joint deployment of theoretical linguistic and experimental psychological research and the value of a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of mind, brain, and language.