Introduction to Computational Cultural Psychology

Yair Neuman is a professor in the Department of Education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Professor Neuman was the chief algorithm developer at IARPA Metaphor Project, where novel algorithms have been developed for the identification of metaphorical language. His work has been published extensively in leading journals for various disciplines including psychology, psychoanalysis, theoretical biology, mathematical modelling, semiotics and information sciences. His last book Reviving the Living: Meaning Making in Living Systems was published in 2008.

• 1. What is computational cultural psychology?; 2. The digital psychologist: information technology and cultural psychology; 3. Why don't primates have God? Language and the abstraction of thought; 4. Lost in translation: how to use automatic translation machines for understanding 'otherness'; 5. Spies and metaphors: automatic identification of metaphors for strategic intelligence; 6. Scent of a woman: the mediation of smell and automatic analysis of extended senses; 7. Dolly Parton's love lexicon: detection of motifs in cultural texts; 8. The relational matrix of the I; 9. Identifying themes: from the Wingfield family to Harry and Sally; 10. Eating and dining: studying the dynamics of dinner; 11. Getting even: the cultural psychology of revenge and what computers can do about it; Epilogue. On generals and mail coach drivers.

'The cognitive sciences have been motivated and guided by the premise that human mentality can be modeled in computational ways through algorithms and other computer formats. The underlying assumption has always been that cognition can be studied as a universal state of the brain independently of its location in space and time. This book challenges this assumption by showing, brilliantly, how cognition is an intricate product of the interaction of the brain, the body, and the situation. Neuman's revision of the algorithmic principle in semiotic terms is truly masterful, showing how computation can serve the modeling process, not dominate it. This work is required reading for all cognitive scientists. It illuminates the core of the modeling problem and shows which path the cognitive sciences must follow in the future in a world that has extended the brain and its capacities in the computational realm of the global village.' Marcel Danesi, University of Toronto and Editor of Semiotica