The happy confluence of two activities led to this book. First, I revised my earlier book, Elements of Graph Design, so thoroughly that it was renamed Graph Design for the Eye and Mind. While working on that project, I noticed that the same psychological principles extend beyond graph design to all visual communication. Those principles of perception and cognition are at work no matter what we humans are doing, be it interpreting graphs, playing golf, reading tea leaves, or anything else (including giving PowerPoint presentations). Second, I was a member of many search committees in my department, which involved sitting through innumerable PowerPoint presentations that -- ironically (given that I'm in a department of psychology) -- violated psychological principles.

The PowerPoint program is like the weather: Everybody likes to complain about it, but nobody does anything about it. This book is an attempt to clear the PowerPoint skies. People complain the most about the presentations PowerPoint allows users to produce, which can be irritating, confusing, boring, condescending, and incomprehensible. I doubt that creators of those presentations intend to come off in any of these ways, but they simply haven't had guidance in how to use this medium to be clear and to the point. This book's mission is to provide that guidance.

Sometimes I get sick of theory. It's hard to know whether the stories we spin should be taken seriously. One way to do a reality check is to see whether a theory leads to specific applications. The fact that science leads to technology is one of its major strengths, and if a theory is correct, I believe that something applied should follow from it.

This book explores some applications that follow from cognitive neuroscience, particularly in the domains of perception and memory. The book presents a set of principles, based on empirical findings, for presenting information effectively in graphs. I not only make use of information about the number of elements that can be held in mind at once, the size labels must be in order to be read easily, and so forth, but also exploit implications of some relatively subtle effects arising from the range of spatial frequency channels in vision, the separation of the "what" and "where" visual pathways, and the like.

The first edition, Elements of Graph Design, was published by W. H. Freeman & Co. in 1994, but when it went out of print in 2004, I decided to use it as the foundation for the present book, which differs from that one in five ways: The principles underlying my recommendations have been revised and reorganized; I have updated the review of research on graphic communication; I have integrated the relevant science of perception and cognition into the text (rather than relegating it to endnotes); I have corrected errors that were present in the earlier edition; and, finally, the book has been redesigned visually for easier reading.

I was delighted to learn a few years ago that the prior edition was a major influence on a new software package called "Graphically!!!" ? or so they say, anyway... Writing this book led directly to my next one, Clear and to the Point, which shows how to use the psychological principles to prepare good PowerPoint (and other electronically-based) presentations.

In this book I and my co-authors, William Thompson and Giorgio Ganis, make the case that mental images depict information and that these depictions play a functional role in human cognition. We have not only tried to summarize the conceptual grounds for positing this species of internal representations but also appealed to many and varied sorts of empirical discoveries. In addition, we have outlined a specific theory of how depictive representations are used in information processing and how they arise from neural processing. We have summarized this theory not to defend our specific formulation but rather to provide an existence proof that such a class of theory can be developed and supported.

The goal of this book is to help students master classic studies mixed with exciting new work, both of which illustrate key concepts in the field of cognitive psychology. This book has an unusual history. Early on, Edward Smith and I confronted the fact that we were not experts in all of the areas of the new cognitive psychology, and so decided to enlist the help of distinguished researchers in the different areas. However, we were also mindful of the need to write a book, not edit a collection of independent chapters. The contributors wrote a first draft (except for chapters 1 and 7, which were written by me and Ed, respectively). Ed and I revised and edited the chapters, and sent them to wordsmith Nancy Brooks, who edited, re-wrote, and ask for clarification--and thus began a detailed process of refining and revising the entire book. Thus the whole team must be thanked for the final product: Adriane Seiffert, Jeremy M. Wolfe, and Frank Tong (chap 2), Marlene Behrmann and Joy Geng (chap 3), Lawrence W. Barsalou (chap 4), Anthony D. Wagner (chap 5), Todd S. Braver (chap 6), Elizabeth Phelps (chap 8), Reid Hastie and Alan Sanfey (chap 9), Kevin Dunbar and Jonathan Fugelsang (chap 10), Jean Decety and Jessica Somerville (chap 11), Maryellen C. MacDonald (chap 12), Jayme Hefler, Susanna Lesan, Jessica Mosher (our editors), and especially Nancy Brooks, editor extraordinaire.

Does the field of psychology really need another introductory psychology textbook? This is what Robin Rosenberg and I, as coauthors, asked each other as we started to consider writing this book. One of us is a cognitive neuroscientist and the other a clinical psychologist. In working together, we began to see how our different areas of psychology were dovetailing. We had both come to view psychology in terms of events that occur at different levels of analysis: the brain (biological factors), the person (beliefs, desires, and feelings), the group (social, cultural, and environmental factors), and their interactions. This view of psychology is exciting because it can be applied to all psychological phenomena and can offer a way to organize a diverse range of theories and discoveries. We realized that this was an important was of teaching psychology. Different fields of psychology are interconnected, although they are not often presented this way in textbooks.

We also wanted to show students that applying the results of psychological research can make learning and remembering easier--not just for this course, but for any course, from economics to art history, and for the demands of life in general. We wanted to do more than just tell students how psychology can help them to be better learners--we wanted to apply these principles in this book, and teach students how to use these principles for themselves.

The first edition (Psychology: The Brain, The Person, The World) was published in 2001, a second edition in 2003, and the third edition (with a new title, Psychology in Context) in 2006. We also published three editions of a briefer text, the current edition of which is Fundamentals of Psychology in Context, published in 2006.

I had a broken leg in 1991-92 (a bad ice skating accident), and was in bed for months. So, I had a computer put at the bedside and used 32 point type so I could see what I was writing, and wrote most of two books that year.

This one is the direct descendant of Image and Mind. It maps the key elements of the earlier theory into a theory about the operation of specific neural structures. In so doing, it draws additional distinctions that were not present in the earlier theory and provides evidence that imagery is an integral part of perception proper. And it leads to new sorts of predictions, which were (and are being) tested using various neuroimaging techniques.

For years, in fits and starts, I've been writing another book on imagery to make the ideas in this one more accessible. One reviewer dwelt on the fact that the book is very (excessively, he clearly meant) detailed. But in my area of research, it's better to be condemned for being too detailed than to be dismissed for being too vague...

It took 9 years to write another book. The problem was that the pure cognitive science approach--at least for me--had run its course. It just wasn't clear how to answer fundamental questions about mechanisms that underlie cognition with the tools at hand (behavioral data, logical analysis, computer models, etc.).

Somewhere around 1985, I came across a now-classic paper by Roger Tootell and his colleagues, illustrating the topographic structure of primary visual cortex in the monkey brain. I was amazed to see a picture of what the animal had been looking at literally projected on its cortex. It had never occurred to me that literally depictive representations in the brain might exist. (Ignorant me: This had been known at least since the early 20th Century.) Of course the mere fact that certain brain areas are physically organized topographically does not necessarily imply that the representations in those areas depict information, but it would be a surprise if they didn't (and they do in fact turn out to be functionally depictive).

The idea of mapping cognitive activity into the brain afforded all sorts of new ways to inform theory. I called this the "Wet Mind" approach--taking advantage of the idea that "the mind is what the brain does" to make use of what is known about the brain to understand the mind.

To teach myself what was known about how the brain does cognition, I taught a course ("Minds, brains, and computers") for a few years. The lecture notes became the first five chapters of this book. Olivier Koenig helped me convert the bits and pieces of later lectures into the rest of the book.

This book provides a "big picture" about how cognitive activities of many sorts arise from the workings of the brain. We did an update in 1995, with an epilogue on emotion. This was just in time. With the explosion of results from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), I'm not sure how we could have written this sort of broadly integrative book today. It will be interesting to see which (if any) of the specific ideas in Wet Mind stand the test of time, but the broad sweep of the approach is still current.

Many people complained to me that the first book was too technical. They were being polite. What they really meant was too self-indulgent. I obsessed about so many details that the trees were buried in the bark (forget about the forest).

This book was an attempt to distill the key ideas in the original theory, with some elaborations. I also wanted to put the theory in context. So, this one touches on visual problem solving and related matters.

I still don't know why Norton decided to put this one out of print. It's still selling in Italy (in Italian). I am now working on a descendant, to be entitled Imagining Mind. This one will put imagery in a very broad context, and provide neuroscientific accounts for phenomena as varied as the placebo effect, hypnosis, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

This book reports 10 years of work on a simple question: "What shape are a German Shepherd's ears?"

I wasn't interested in the answer itself, but rather in the ways that people go about trying to answer questions like this when the object isn't actually in front of them... Usually, people report that they visualize and "look" with the mind's eye. But what does this mean? There's no light up there, and no inner eye.

This book was an attempt to grapple with these, and related, philosophical questions from a scientific perspective. (At that time I was going, sporadically, to a discussion group with Ned Block, Dan Dennett, Jerry Fodor, George Smith, and assorted other philosophers, and was oriented that way.) It is also an attempt to explain a mountain of data, mostly from studies of the time people require to make certain kinds of decisions when they use imagery.

The book is an example of what I later called the "Dry Mind" approach. It focused on computer models, and the brain is only mentioned in passing. In retrospect, I'm amazed that much of the theory still seems reasonable--even in a neurological context.