This book presents the contributions of the members of an Advanced
Research Workshop on Cogni ti ve Science Perspectives on Emotion,
Motivation and Cognition. The Workshop, funded mainly by the NATO
Scientific Affairs Division, together with a contribution from the
(British) Economic and Social Research Council, was conducted at II
Ciocco, Tuscany, Italy, 21-27 June 1987. The venue for our discussions
was ideal: a quiet holiday hotel, 500m high in the Apennine mountain
range, approached by a mile of perilously steep, winding narrow road.
The isolation was conducive to concentrated discussions on the topics of
the Workshop. The reason for the Workshop was a felt need for
researchers from disparate but related approaches to cognition, emotion,
and motivation to communicate their perspectives and arguments to one
another. To take just one example, the framework of information
processing and the metaphor of mind as a computer has wrought a major
revolution in psychological theories of cogni tion. That framework has
radically altered the way psychologists conceptualize perception,
memory, language, thought, and action. Those advances have formed the
intellectual substrate for the "cognitive science" perspective on mental
life.