Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.

The mental model theory of thinking and reasoning is the focus of this Web site. Mental models are representations in the mind of real or imaginary situations. Scientists sometimes use the term "mental model" as a synonym for "mental representation", but it has a narrower referent in the case of the theory of thinking and reasoning. The idea that people rely on mental models can be traced back to Kenneth Craik’s suggestion in 1943 that the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to anticipate events. Mental models can be constructed from perception, imagination, or the comprehension of discourse. They underlie visual images, but they can also be abstract, representing situations that cannot be visualised. Each mental model represents a possibility. Mental models are akin to architects' models or to physicists' diagrams in that their structure is analogous to the structure of the situation that they represent, unlike, say, the structure of logical forms used in formal rule theories. In this respect they are a little like pictures in the "picture" theory of language described by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922.

In two experiments we assessed the degree to which memory for events are similar or differ depending on whether they were narrative or autobiographical events. Consistent with previous research on autobiographical memory, memories for events captured the sequential order of events. However, in contrast to autobiographical memory research, ratings of importance did not appear to be related to retrieval speed. An analysis of causal connectivity of the recalled events was significantly related to retrieval speed. Issues of narrative comprehension and memory, autobiographical memory, and their overlap are discussed.

This study examined the forgetting curves for information read in a novel. People read a 10-chapter novel where each chapter covered an approximately 10-year period in the life of the protagonist. After reading the entire novel, participants completed various memory tests in which they summarised the novel, provided associated information from cues, and answered specific questions. Performance was plotted as the amount of information or the accuracy of question answering for each chapter. All of the memory tests revealed similar patterns: (a) better performance for early information (a primacy effect), (b) a bump in performance when the protagonist was approximately 20 years old, and (c) a smaller bump in performance when the protagonist began a career later in life. These results are considered in the context of theories of forgetting, autobiographical memory, and situation models.

There are also a number of potential applications to information technology. Interfaces designed to teach procedures or scientific processes may benefit from explicitly representing the event structure of the activity for the learner (Zacks & Tversky, 2003). Psychologically adaptive segmentation may provide an efficient way of summarizing large databases of video or multimedia for search and editing (Christoffersen, Woods, & Blike, 2007). Identifying event boundaries may be helpful in scheduling interruptions in the context of tasks such as piloting, driving, or operating machinery.
Finally, event segmentation may provide a powerful lens through which to view art and literature. One important thing that cinema, television, and literature do is represent events. Some basic features of these ubiquitous media are still poorly understood. For example, how is it possible that a film can cut from one time and place to another, instantaneously changing all the information in the visual field, without disorienting the viewer (Münsterberg & Griffith, 1916/1970)? One possibility is that the perception of events regulates how cuts are perceived and which sorts of cuts “work” (Zacks & Magliano, in press). What does a reader retain over the reading of an extended novel (Copeland, Radvansky, & Goodwin, 2009; Radvansky, Copeland, & Zwaan, 2005)? The behavioral and neurophysiological data suggest that readers construct event representations that are segmented according to the same mechanisms as govern the segmentation of live action (Speer et al., 2009; Zacks et al., 2009). Thus, the chunking of experience into events may enable disparate artistic forms to convey experience.

When reading a story or watching a film, comprehenders construct a series of representations in order to understand the events depicted. Discourse comprehension theories and a recent theory of perceptual event segmentation both suggest that comprehenders monitor situational features such as characters’ goals, to update these representations at natural boundaries in activity. However, the converging predictions of these theories had previously not been tested directly. Two studies provided evidence that changes in situational features such as characters, their locations, their interactions with objects, and their goals are related to the segmentation of events in both narrative texts and films. A 3rd study indicated that clauses with event boundaries are read more slowly than are other clauses and that changes in situational features partially mediate this relation. A final study suggested that the predictability of incoming information influences reading rate and possibly event segmentation. Taken together, these results suggest that processing situational changes during comprehension is an important determinant of how one segments ongoing activity into events and that this segmentation is related to the control of processing during reading.

Melanie C. Green is a social psychologist whose research has focused on the power of narrative to change beliefs, including the effects of fictional stories on real-world attitudes. Her theory of "transportation into a narrative world" focuses on immersion into a story as a mechanism of narrative influence. Dr. Green has examined narrative persuasion in a variety of contexts, from health communication to social issues.

"In today's media society, in which hundreds of different media compete for the attention of viewers, readers and listeners, a great deal of importance is attached to presenting oneself."

Synthesizers' frequency of contribution was affected more by their impact on other wiki users, while adders' contribution frequency was affected more by being able to accomplish their immediate work.

Privacy is a complex and often abstract topic: this symposium will address "visual privacy," a subset of the much broader topic of data privacy, and bring together experts from a range of perspectives.

The human ecology of memory studies remembering and forgetting in relation to "the physical, cultural, economic, social, and aesthetic environment that surrounds human beings from birth to death."

I see only functional, structural, behavioural and developmental models. People... are reduced to something programmable. And I think this has something to do with why computing technologies ultimately lack the pervasiveness of other technologies.

The first explicit account of the cognitive processes and structures that contribute to creative thinking and discovery.

This is a scholarly book edited and written by leading researchers in the area of human development...

This book is a composition of five lectures that took place at the Univeridad Centroamericana located in Central American country of Managua...

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In these seven lectures, written in 1932, Freud supplements the "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" (also called the General Introduction to Psychoanalysis) delivered in 1915-17, with additions and amendments to his theory developed through the...

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This review is being written as I am reading "The Presentation of the Self" for the third time...

While the principles outlined in the book do not involve rocket science, unwise application of these very principles can lead to serious trouble...

Gregory Bateson made substantial contributions to many fields of science...

The above phrase is the conclusion I came to after reading this book at the library...

In this valuable study, Dr Laing proposes to examine the way some individuals are very proficient in acquiring a false self in order to adapt to false realities and to give an account of specifically personal forms of depersonalisation and...

Finally, after all these years, we're starting to unlearn duality...

This book is written primarily for academics...

Donald Norman has always written "usable" books...

Bruner raises some interesting points and rather validly questions some of the developments in psychology and the search for meaning...

'Landscape for a Good Woman' marks a turning point in how history is written...