Discovering the Social Mind

In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts themselves present career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, and their major practical theoretical contributions. Christopher D. Frith has an international reputation as an eminent scholar and pioneer in the fields of schizophrenia, consciousness, and social cognition. A specially written introduction gives an overview of his career and contextualises the selection in relation to changes in the field during this time. This collection reflects the various directions of Frith's work, which has become increasingly philosophically oriented throughout his career, and enables the reader to trace major developments in these areas over the last forty years. Frith has had his work nominated for the Royal Society Science Book Award and, in 2009, was awarded the Fyssen Foundation Prize for his work on neuropsychology. He has also been awarded several prestigious prizes for his collaborative work with Uta Frith. This book is an essential read for those students and researchers engaged in the fields of social cognition, cognitive psychology and consciousness studies.

Christopher D. Frith is a Psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, UK.

1. Consciousness, information processing and schizophrenia 2. Experiences of alien control in schizophrenia reflect a disorder in the central monitoring of action 3. Elective affinities in schizophrenia and childhood autism 4. Abnormalities in the awareness and control of action 5. Explaining delusions of control: The comparator model 20 years on 6. Willed action and the prefrontal cortex in man: a study with PET 7. The neural correlates of conscious experience: an experimental framework 8. What's at the top in the top-down control of action? Script-sharing and 'top-top' control of action in cognitive experiments 9. Action, agency and responsibility 10. Meeting of minds: the medial frontal cortex and social cognition 11. The role of gaze in dialogue 12. Predictive coding: an account of the mirror neuron system 13. Optimally interacting minds 14. Supra-Personal Cognitive Control and Metacognition