The Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology, Volume 16 Book

This textbook by Anderson was a very easy read on cognitive psychology. The book starts slowly with the basic ideas of psychobiology (such as brain structure, neurons, etc.) and slowly progresses to the main concepts of cognitive psychology. For those that are unfamiliar with cognitive psychology, it is focused on understanding how our brain works. The book goes over subjects such as how our brain performs tasks such as: perception, attention, memory, problem solving, reasoning, and language comprehension. This book definitely covers all the basic topics that are currently relevant in cognitive psychology, and therefore it contains all the information that I expected from it.

The layout of the book is really user friendly. Each chapter has a conclusion section, and offers “questions for thoughts” which are really useful in practically using the information that was covered in the chapter. One part of the book that I liked was the “implications” sections scattered throughout the text, which questions some of the basic tenets of cognitive psychology. The “implications” sections take the concepts, presented in the book, from the world of the theoretical into the world of the practical, such as “why do children make bad decisions” and “how convincing are 90% test results.” These sections are what makes the book more useful in real world situations, than other textbooks on the same subject.

There were plenty of pictures and diagrams to help explain the concepts that the author discussed. My love of optical illusions and other brain puzzles was one of the main reasons why I fell in love with the field of psychology. I fondly remember looking through my psych 101 textbook to find all the puzzles and optical illusions, so I was extremely excited to see some of my favorite mind puzzles in the book. The puzzles help to show the reader some of the strange traits of our brains, which help to bring to life many of the concepts that are written in the book. So all the pictures, puzzles, and optical illusions are fun to read, and they definitely constitute my favorite parts of the book.

As a clinician, this book is useful in helping to understand how the brain works, and may be useful to keep as a handy reference especially if you are working with a population where brain trauma may be likely. This textbook may also be useful for research purposes; however, despite the “implications” sections, it lacks any real practicality unless you are specifically using some of the more cognitive theories such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

With that said, I have to give this book an average score. It definitely had all the basics that I expected from a book on the subject; however it failed to offer little more. Although there was definitely some more theoretical thinking in this text than I remember in the textbooks I used for my cognitive psych class, there was still very little as far as any real philosophical thoughts by the author. This book stuck with the major objective and experimental aspects of cognitive psych, which is what I would expect from a textbook for undergraduates. For graduate students this book would offer up little more than a review for those that are unable to remember what they had learned in their previous cog psych classes.