Cognition: The Thinking Animal, Second Edition

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding cognitive psychology textbook
Review: Before selecting a textbook for my cognitive psychology course, I read sections of many of the textbooks available. The Willingham textbook was by far the most readable and engaging. The students' evaluations confirmed my opinion; the vast majority loved the book. I had the same result in two different semester with about 100 students per semester. I'm using the second edition next semester.

Rating:
Summary: Bad Book
Review: I take this professor at UVa, good guy, good professor but the book is poorly written. A pain to read and doesnt make much sense, Poor english is used. Dont buy this book

Rating:
Summary: An adequate text
Review: I used the Willingham text for my cognition course. At first I was delighted to find an author who attempted to frame the content of cognitive psychology as simple questions, devoid of jargon, the importance of which could be easily grasped by students. As the semester went on however, I found that the students found the text tedious and confusing. I feel that this was due to the lack of explicitly connecting the specific concepts back to the general theme of the chapter. Furthermore, his descriptions of certain experiments were outright confusing and ambiguously described, even to me. I think the approach is admirable- but the goal hasnt been reached yet. I look forward to the next edition, and hope I can once again use the text.

Rating:
Summary: The Easiest to Read and Understand Required Text Ever!
Review: I wanted to learn about this subject and took the class from the author of the book at UVa. He's a pretty good professor but a terrible author of books. there are many usuage/grammatical mistakes in the book and its extremely hard to read. Doesnt make much sense and is highly not recommended.

Rating:
Summary: The Easiest to Read and Understand Required Text Ever!
Review: If you actually have interest in the subject - this book is very easy to follow and understand. There are great 'real-life' examples for everything and questions (with answers in the back) at the end of every section so you can test yourself. The writing style is pretty casual (which is what separates it from many other books on the topic) and I also noticed a few minor spelling and grammatical errors - but nothing that disrupts the reading or understanding, provided your reading level is at or above 5th grade.

Rating:
Summary: Good, for a text book
Review: Most psychology text books I've had to read have been a pain, but I found this one pretty easy to read and understand. (I think maybe the guys from UVA with the prof. that wrote this book must have a personal agenda...) But, that's just my opinion. Not that most of us have a choice in reading text books...