A Textbook That Lives On: Explaining Cognitive Psychology

This year I published the tenth edition of my textbook Cognition: Theory and Applications. It came as a pleasant surprise because I had no intentions of revising the ninth edition when I retired from San Diego State University in 2014. However, a major publisher (SAGE in Thousand Oaks, CA) invited me to write a new edition that required an extensive revision of the previous edition. They likely considered the book to be a ‘classic’ that was worth saving based on its many previous editions.
 
The story of my book started in 1971 when I began teaching an undergraduate cognitive psychology course to upper-division psychology majors at Case Western Reserve University. Cognitive psychology was a new field and there were no textbooks. Ulric Neisser’s 1967 book on cognition deserves credit for introducing the field to psychologists and it served as my make-shift text. There were still few cognitive psychology texts in 1979 when I began writing mine while a visiting associate professor at Berkeley.


SAGE did not have specific recommendations about new content in the tenth edition but I added a chapter on action, my first new chapter since the publication of the first edition in 1981. The book’s chapters are divided into three sections:


Cognitive Components:
Pattern Recognition
Attention
Short-term Memory
Long-term Memory
Action


Cognitive Representations:
Memory Codes
Visual Imagery
Categorization
Semantic Organization


Cognitive Skills
Language
Decision Making
Problem Solving
Expertise and Creativity


Other changes included a greater emphasis on applications and cognitive neuroscience. The biggest change, however, is that the tenth edition is my first in full color. SAGE required that I add photos of people performing various cognitive activities to supplement the colored figures and diagrams. I initially considered these photos as ‘fluff’ but later realized that they help connect theories and data to our lives.


I enjoyed searching for colorful photos that served this purpose and would occasionally make readers smile or provide engaging elaboration of the topic. The passage from the LITTLE INSTRUCTION BOOK illustrates the use of the words ‘and’ and ‘or’ in language but requires students to search for the words (and receive good advice).

The picture of a wheelbarrow illustrates that people routinely consider some members of categories (such as ‘vehicle’) to be more representative (a car) of the category than others (a wheelbarrow). The photo made me smile because the dog looks like our dog but I hope it will also elicit a smile from others.

The picture of Dr. Seuss is from the front of the Geisel Library on the University of California, San Diego campus.  It appears in my chapter on expertise and creativity.
Textbooks differ from other books because some are supported by learning platforms that offer helpful assistance to both instructors and students. The Vantage platform that supports my text includes interactive media tools, videos of classic experiments, and graded assignments to activate student engagement and critical thinking. You can read portions of the book by visiting the book’s website at  https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/ nam/cognition/book270299 and clicking on PREVIEW.


Submitted by Guest Author
Stephen Reed


Click the below link to read another article written by guest author Stephen Reed. It was posted by MOTAL in December 2021, How to prepare students for jobs in the 21st century.