93 books like The Science of False Memory

Professor Elizabeth Loftus essentially launched the modern field of eyewitness studies with her experiments on the dynamics of human memory in the eyewitness context, and this book discusses her most important experiments, major studies which reinvigorated this important field.

She demonstrated that memory can be reconfigured in the presence of post-event information, to the degree that a given eyewitness memory may bear no resemblance to the actual events supposedly being remembered.

This is among the most important books in forensic cognitive science, the psychological basis of law enforcement, and the criminal justice system.

Loftus began the studies which culminated in my own book. Her work focused on eyewitness memory, but has implications far beyond that realm in more modern research.

The dynamics she identified operate in realms as disparate as officer-involved shootings, training for the detection of terrorist bombs, and even beliefs in paranormal phenomena and "sightings" of such… show more.

This 1932 work by Bartlett demonstrates many of the dynamics that Loftus would later use to conceptualize eyewitness memory, and that many scholars in law enforcement psychology, including myself, use on an everyday basis.

Bartlett showed that memories are not static representations of reality, admittedly with occasional lapses into forgetting.

Rather, in both the visual and verbal realms, Bartlett demonstrated that memories become abbreviated, operate in the direction of core or gist, and may be completely reconfigured in the direction of personal belief.

This work demonstrates strongly the fragility of human perception, memory, and the thought which derives from these more basic processes, and shows us how difficult it may be to develop vertical accounts of actual crimes in investigative and courtroom settings.

This is an excellent work in which Dr. Miller smoothly blends the principles of modern psychology with the street realities of modern law enforcement situations. 

It is an excellent companion to my own work which focuses on cognitive factors in the criminal justice system, and also on my book, which deals with these factors in the realm of fire service and other first responder emergency operations. 

Dr. Miller gives a realistic view of psychology in the dangerous realm of law enforcement.

Colonel Grossman's work, with Loren Christensen, discusses, in practical if sometimes harsh terms, the realities of psychology in combat, hard realities encountered by military personnel and by law enforcement officers. 

This is a critical work for anyone interested in the realities of the human mind in battle, and especially for those mental health personnel who may have to deal with the harsh realities of violence in mental health settings without personal experience or personal understanding of the field realities of combat and violence.

This book should be required reading for anyone dealing with military or law enforcement personnel in the mental health realm.

This book provides the reader with a foundation as to how we think through our bodily experience in the world. It argues that we think through the body and through experience and that bodily engagement with the world (organism-environment interaction) is used to develop more abstract modes of thought.

I find this key to understanding design generally.

Where Andy Clark leaves off, claiming that cognition is extended into the environment via the tools that we use, Kirchhoff and Kiverstein take up claiming that consciousness itself may also be extended into the environment under certain circumstances. Consider that moment when you and someone close to you are both trying to remember the name of some actor from a movie. You both feel like the name is on the tip of your tongues but can’t quite come to a realization. You manage to blurt out the first name but nothing else and then your partner blurts out the last name. As per Andy Clark, this is clearly a case of extended cognition between two people. But is it perhaps also a case of a momentary shared consciousness? 

Kirchhoff and Kiverstein first provide a scholarly analytical philosophical treatment of recent iterations of the extended cognition hypothesis primarily to draw the… show more.

On the last page of The Continuity of Mind, I playfully hinted at a sequel (probably written by someone else) that would continue the paradigm’s push not just away from a “computer metaphor for the mind” but even beyond a brain-based approach to cognition. A couple of years later, Tony Chemero published Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, which (to me) felt like that sequel. 

In Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Chemero draws on philosophy, then on cognitive psychology, then on dynamical systems theory, then on ecological psychology, and finally back to philosophy to tell the story of a progressive interdisciplinary approach to understanding sensorimotor processing and human experience as belonging to the natural order – rather than being some unique phenomenon that has no overlap with the rest of the natural world. After setting the stage with a treatment of the philosophical background and defining what the theoretical stakes… show more.

When I was a musician encountering theory in cognitive science for the first time, this book really moved me. I was searching for conceptual lenses on cognition in instrumental practice and this book is aimed at grounding the study of cognition in the body. I can still see myself sitting at a huge ugly desk under a tiny window thoroughly absorbed in this thrilling page-turner in the philosophy of mind. The book moved me so profoundly that I cried when I approached the last page, and gently closed the back cover. It is a precious book. It changed my world. 

Stanovich takes his title from the very last sentence in Richard Dawkin’s book The Selfish Gene, “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” In his book, Stanovich shows how human beings are able to rebel against those selfish replicators – our genes. It involves exercising, in Kahneman’s terminology, our ‘system two’ and exercising tenacity and self-discipline in bringing to bear logic and rationality in our decisions. This book is not an easy read, but it is a fascinating account of why human thinking is different and of what such differences might in principle enable us to do. 

This book profoundly influenced my thinking process, combining the worlds of mathematics, art, and music. I was captivated by how the book explores the deep connections between Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Escher’s art, and Bach’s art of counterpoint.

The book’s puzzles and thought experiments pushed me to think more abstractly and critically. Despite being dense, I found it incredibly rewarding and eye-opening. I recommend this book to anyone interested in logic, creativity, and the nature of human thought. It’s a masterpiece!