Higher Level Language Processes in the Brain: Inference and Comprehension Processes

Higher Level Language Processes in the Brainis a groundbreaking book that explains how behavior research, computational models, and brain imaging results can be unified in the study of human comprehension. The volume illustrates the most comprehensive and newest findings on the topic. Each section of the book nurtures the theoretical and practical integration of behavioral, computational, and brain imaging studies along a different avenue, and each is supplementary. Readers with limited background knowledge on the methods are presented with an easy-to-read, state-of-the-art exposition that is conceptualized and written from a well-established point of view. Higher Level Language Processes in the Brainis intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate cognitive science students, as well as researchers and practitioners who seek to learn and apply scientific knowledge about human comprehension to reading analysis.

Franz Schmalhofer is professor of cognitive psychology and cognitive science at the Universität Osnabrück, Germany and a member of the Institute of Cogntive  Science. He has received a Master's degree (Dipl-Psych) from the Universität Regensburg in 1978 and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in 1982. In 1996, he completed the Habilitation at the Universität Heidelberg with a venia legendi in psychology. From 1982-1989 he has held academic prositions at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Freiburg, Germany, McGill University, Canada, and was a visiting scientist at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Colorado. Before joining the University of Osnabrück, he has been a group leader and senior scientist at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, where his work has been focused on formal Knowledge Systems, Knowledge Acquisition, and Knowledge Management. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Potsdam. Next to this work and research in decision making, problem solving, human-computer interaction, his continued research interest has been in text comprehension and situation models. On these topics, he has published in several edited journals and authored a book in addition to several edited volumes. In the academic year of 2004/2005, Franz Schmalhofer was a visitiing scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) of the University of Pittsburgh where he joined Professor Perfetti in an effort on extending and integrating different research methods for the study of  higher level comprehension processes by a word by word process analysis. This research employs prominent theories of text compehension and further details, extends, integrates, and updates current theories of human understanding by brain imaging techniques (ERP,  fMRI) and computational analyses, thus yielding a more integrative cognitive science view of comprehension processes and the mentally constructed situation models, including various indicators of the underlying neurophysiological processes.