Cambridge Handbook of Computational Psychology

computational psychology, multi-agent modeling, network theory, networks, neurophilosophy, psychology, robert west, ron sun, social cognition, social connectionism, social epistemology, social ontology, sociology

Here’s a review by Robert West of Ron Sun’s (Ed.) book that has been very useful to me (I mean that I have already been using the book): Rob West’s review will better articulate the book’s virtues. (Reference books are notoriously difficult to review – a job admirably well done by Rob West).

Abstract:

Computational psychology refers to the effort to create computational mechanisms that, in some way, mimic mechanisms within the brain. More specifically, the goal in creating these mechanisms is to show that they can systematically reproduce patterns of human behaviour elicited under specific conditions. From this it is inferred that these mechanisms bare some similarity to the brain mechanisms that produced the human behaviours. In most cases this involves mimicking the results of psychology experiments, although it is good to see in this book, two chapters discussing the application of this approach to non experimental areas (multi agent social interactions and cognitive engineering).