Abnormal Psychology
(2nd Edition)
2014
Worth Publishers

(From the publisher) “Rosenberg and Kosslyn's Abnormal Psychology brings students to the very forefront of the study of the brain and its role in psychological disorders. Now that text returns in a new edition that again matches the latest research from neuroscience to culture-based approaches with riveting human examples, helping your students understand the both the scientific foundations and the personal impact of mental illness. The new edition also brings forward the books distinctive emphasis on the dynamic interplay between the neurological, psychological, and social factors involved in understanding psychological disorders and their treatment.'

The first edition was published in 2009, and in 2011 we published a briefer text, Essentials of Abnormal Psychology.

Top Brain, Bottom Brain:
Surprising Insights
into How You Think
2013
Simon & Schuster

Why one more book about the brain?

Because this one is different.

Top Brain, Bottom Brain offers a new, defensible theory of brain functioning and psychology, based on a major anatomical distinction that is frequently overlooked. The 'Theory of Cognitive Modes' that we present here is built on conclusions arising from decades of research that, for the most part, has remained inside scientific circles. A 'cognitive mode' is a general way of thinking that underlies how a person approaches the world and interacts with other people. ...

In this book, we seek to return to the hypothesis-driven tradition by proposing a new, plausible, and coherent theory that is strongly rooted in empirical findings. ... We hope that the reader will take the ideas we present as well-founded hypotheses that are worth considering, not as received truth. We also hope this book will inspire a new round of studies that will further enrich our understanding of how the brain really works.

More than that, we hope that our Theory of Cognitive Modes will be an important contribution to understanding ourselves, as humans and as individual people. The theory we offer here should prompt you to think about issues you probably did not previously consider. Whether your interest is to evolve personally, socially, or in business --or all three-- we believe that understanding and considering the Theory of Cognitive Modes can benefit you.

Introducing Psychology:
Brain, Person, Group
(4th Edition)
2010
Pearson Learning Solutions

Does the field of psychology really need another introductory psychology textbook? This is what Robin Rosenberg and I, as coauthors, asked each other as we started to consider writing the first edition of this book. One of us is a cognitive neuroscientist and the other a clinical psychologist. In working together, we began to see how our different areas of psychology were dovetailing. We had both come to view psychology in terms of events that occur at different levels of analysis: the brain (biological factors), the person (beliefs, desires, and feelings), the group (social, cultural, and environmental factors), and their interactions. This view of psychology is exciting because it can be applied to all psychological phenomena and can offer a way to organize a diverse range of theories and discoveries. We realized that this was an important way of teaching psychology. Different fields of psychology are interconnected, although they are not often presented this way in textbooks.

Introducing Psychology: Brain, Person, Group is the fourth edition of this textbook. The first edition (Psychology: the Brain, the Person, the World) was published in 2001, a second edition in 2003, and a third edition (Psychology in Context) in 2006. We have also published three editions of a briefer text, the current edition of which is Fundamentals of Psychology in Context, published in 2006 by Allyn & Bacon (now part of Pearson).

Better PowerPoint®
2010
Oxford University Press

Although Clear and to the Point was generally well-received, it soon became clear to me that there is still a need for another, more focused, book--for at least two reasons: First, most people interested in PowerPoint presentations have already made at least one; they are not PowerPoint innocents. Second, people who want a book on presentations want one that they can use easily, not one they can take to an armchair and read cover to cover over the course of an evening or two.

This book distills the core of my earlier book into a quick guide on how to revise an existing presentation. I have also added new material, partly in response to feedback I received regarding the earlier book. This book is organized so that the reader can easily revise a presentation in a couple of hours, using simple checklists at the start of each chapter.

Clear and to the Point
2007
Oxford University Press

The happy confluence of two activities led to this book. First, while working on a revision of an earlier book about graph design, I noticed that the same psychological principles extend beyond graph design to all visual communication. Those principles of perception and cognition are at work no matter what we humans are doing, be it interpreting graphs, playing golf, reading tea leaves, or anything else (including giving PowerPoint presentations). Second, I was a member of many search committees in my department, which involved sitting through innumerable PowerPoint presentations that -- ironically (given that I'm in a department of psychology) -- violated psychological principles.

The PowerPoint program is like the weather: Everybody likes to complain about it, but nobody does anything about it. This book is an attempt to clear the PowerPoint skies. People complain the most about the presentations PowerPoint allows users to produce, which can be irritating, confusing, boring, condescending, and incomprehensible. I doubt that creators of those presentations intend to come off in any of these ways, but they simply haven't had guidance in how to use this medium to be clear and to the point. This book's mission is to provide that guidance.

Graph Design for the
Eye and Mind
2006
Oxford University Press

Sometimes I get sick of theory. It's hard to know whether the stories we spin should be taken seriously. One way to do a reality check is to see whether a theory leads to specific applications. The fact that science leads to technology is one of its major strengths, and if a theory is correct, I believe that something applied should follow from it.

This book explores some applications that follow from cognitive neuroscience, particularly in the domains of perception and memory. The book presents a set of principles, based on empirical findings, for presenting information effectively in graphs. I not only make use of information about the number of elements that can be held in mind at once, the size labels must be in order to be read easily, and so forth, but also exploit implications of some relatively subtle effects arising from the range of spatial frequency channels in vision, the separation of the 'what' and 'where' visual pathways, and the like.

The first edition, Elements of Graph Design, was published by W. H. Freeman & Co. in 1994, but when it went out of print in 2004, I decided to use it as the foundation for the present book, which differs from that one in five ways: The principles underlying my recommendations have been revised and reorganized; I have updated the review of research on graphic communication; I have integrated the relevant science of perception and cognition into the text (rather than relegating it to endnotes); I have corrected errors that were present in the earlier edition; and, finally, the book has been redesigned visually for easier reading.

The Case for Mental Imagery
2006
Oxford University Press

Cognitive Psychology:
Mind and Brain
2006
Prentice Hall

Image and Brain
1994
MIT Press

I had a broken leg in 1991-92 (a bad ice skating accident), and was in bed for months. So, I had a computer put at the bedside and used 32 point type so I could see what I was writing, and wrote most of two books that year.

This one is the direct descendant of Image and Mind. It maps the key elements of the earlier theory into a theory about the operation of specific neural structures. In so doing, it draws additional distinctions that were not present in the earlier theory and provides evidence that imagery is an integral part of perception proper. And it leads to new sorts of predictions, which were (and are being) tested using various neuroimaging techniques.

For years, in fits and starts, I've been writing another book on imagery to make the ideas in this one more accessible. One reviewer dwelt on the fact that the book is very (excessively, he clearly meant) detailed. But in my area of research, it's better to be condemned for being too detailed than to be dismissed for being too vague...

Wet Mind
1995
Free Press

It took 9 years to write another book. The problem was that the pure cognitive science approach--at least for me--had run its course. It just wasn't clear how to answer fundamental questions about mechanisms that underlie cognition with the tools at hand (behavioral data, logical analysis, computer models, etc.). Somewhere around 1985, I came across a now-classic paper by Roger Tootell and his colleagues, illustrating the topographic structure of primary visual cortex in the monkey brain. I was amazed to see a picture of what the animal had been looking at literally projected on its cortex. It had never occurred to me that literally depictive representations in the brain might exist. (Ignorant me: This had been known at least since the early 20th century.) Of course the mere fact that certain brain areas are physically organized topographically does not necessarily imply that the representations in those areas depict information, but it would be a surprise if they didn't (and they do in fact turn out to be functionally depictive).

The idea of mapping cognitive activity into the brain afforded all sorts of new ways to inform theory. I called this the 'Wet Mind' approach--taking advantage of the idea that 'the mind is what the brain does' to make use of what is known about the brain to understand the mind. To teach myself what was known about how the brain does cognition, I taught a course ('Minds, Brains, & Computers') for a few years. The lecture notes became the first five chapters of this book. Olivier Koenig helped me convert the bits and pieces of later lectures into the rest of the book.

This book, first published in 1992, provides a 'big picture' of how cognitive activities of many sorts arise from the workings of the brain. We did an update in 1995, with an epilogue on emotion. This was just in time. With the explosion of results from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), I'm not sure how we could have written this sort of broadly integrative book today. It will be interesting to see which (if any) of the specific ideas in Wet Mind stand the test of time, but the broad sweep of the approach is still current.

Ghosts in the Mind's Machine
1983
W. W. Norton & Co.

Many people complained to me that the first book was too technical. They were being polite. What they really meant was too self-indulgent. I obsessed about so many details that the trees were buried in the bark (forget about the forest).

This book was an attempt to distill the key ideas in the original theory, with some elaborations. I also wanted to put the theory in context. So, this one touches on visual problem solving and related matters.

Image and Mind
1980
Harvard University Press

This book reports 10 years of work on a simple question: 'What shape are a German Shepherd's ears?'

I wasn't interested in the answer itself, but rather in the ways that people go about trying to answer questions like this when the object isn't actually in front of them... Usually, people report that they visualize and 'look' with the mind's eye. But what does this mean? There's no light up there, and no inner eye.

This book was an attempt to grapple with these, and related, philosophical questions from a scientific perspective. (At that time I was going, sporadically, to a discussion group with Ned Block, Dan Dennett, Jerry Fodor, George Smith, and assorted other philosophers, and was oriented that way.) It is also an attempt to explain a mountain of data, mostly from studies of the time people require to make certain kinds of decisions when they use imagery.

The book is an example of what I later called the 'Dry Mind' approach. It focused on computer models, and the brain is only mentioned in passing. In retrospect, I'm amazed that much of the theory still seems reasonable--even in a neurological context.