versity level. The order of the readings could certainly be varied without loss of
coherence, although I think that the first few readings fit better at the begin-
ning. After that any order should work.
The readings begin with philosophical foundations, and it is useful to keep
these in mind when reading the remainder of the articles. This reflects the view
that good science builds on earlier foundations, even if it ultimately rejects
them.
This anthology differs from most other cognition readers in its coverage of
several topics not typically taught in cognition courses. One is human factors
and ergonomics, the study of how we interact with tools, machines, and arti-
facts, and what cognitive psychology can tell us about how to improve the de-
sign of such objects (including computers); this is represented in the excellent
papers by Don Norman. Another traditionally underrepresented topic, evolu-
tionary psychology, is represented here by two articles, one by David Buss and
his colleagues, and the other by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. Also unusual
are the inclusion of sections on music cognition, experimental design, and as
mentioned before, philosophical foundations. You will find that there is some-
whatlesscoverage of neuroscience and computer science perspectives on cog-
nition, simply because in our department at McGill, we teach separate courses
on those topics, and this reader reflects an attempt to reduce overlap.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the many publishers and authors who agreed to let their works be included
here, my students, and Amy Brand, Tom Stone, Carolyn Anderson, Margy Avery, and Kathleen
Caruso at MIT Press. I am indebted in particular to the following students from my cognition class
for their tireless efforts at proofreading and indexing this book: Lindsay Ball, Ioana Dalca, Nora
Hussein, Christine Kwong, Aliza Miller, Bianca Mugyenyi, Patrick Sabourin, and Hannah Wein-
stangel. I also would like to thank my wife, Caroline Traube, who is a constant source of surprise
and inspiration and whose intuitions about cognitive psychology have led to many new studies.
Finally, I was extraordinarily lucky to have three outstanding scholars as teachers: Mike Posner,
Doug Hintzman, and Roger Shepard, to whom this book is dedicated. I would like to thank them
for their patience, inspiration, support, and friendship.
xvi Preface