If somebody can recommend a superior alternative, we'll be delighted to update the reading list!

A major problem here is that cognitive science covers such a broad area that any "general book of cognitive science" will either have to leave large gaps in its coverage, or have such brief coverage of every topic that they become superficial enough to be useless. AI, theoretical computer science, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, linguistics... these are all fields that a proper summary of cognitive science should talk about, and within each you'll find several relevant subfields, to boot.

Given that state of affairs, I don't think that it's very useful to look for a "general cognitive science textbook" - one would be better off listing cogsci-oriented introductory textbooks to the different subfields that I mentioned. I can mention some of the ones that my university's cogsci program used and which I thought were good:

• Cognitive Psychology: A Student's Handbook is an invaluable resource, packed full of theories of mental phenomena like visual perception, object recognition, attention, learning and memory, concepts and categories, language comprehension, language production, creativity, and reasoning. It tends to be quite even-handed when there exist several competing theories, pointing out their various strengths and weaknesses. (As an undergraduate cramming for an exam, this gave me headaches, since this style is much less "just memorize it all"-friendly than traditional textbooks.) Note that my experience is with the fifth edition, while the Amazon link is to the sixth, but I don't expect the quality to have worsened.
• Goldstein's Sensation and Perception is a very nice introduction to the way that data from the various senses is processed in the brain. Of particular LW relevance is that it does hammer home the fact that the map is not the territory, as it becomes quite clear that the sensory data that we perceive is the result of rather extensive processing. (Again, my experience is with a slightly older edition.)
• Introduction to Connectionist Modelling of Cognitive Processes was a fantastic introduction to the topic, though it's a bit old. On the other hand, since it essentially discusses mathematical models, the models themselves don't stop being valid math even when time goes by, and understanding them will still be useful in understanding more recent models. I've covered it previously.
• If you want a historical look into cognitive science, Minds, Brains, and Computers: An Historical Introduction to the Foundations of Cognitive Science is an anthology with several classic cogsci papers from over the years. Probably not worth reading if one is only interested in the state of cogsci as it exists today, however.

Interesting, thanks. I was surprised that you appreciated Bermudez making himself invisible, given how much it irked me. Also, I hadn't considered the value of learning the history of cognitive science. This book did indeed transmit that information well.

The book felt noisy in part because I already knew a lot of the information on a superficial level (via introductory biology, psychology, information theory, and artificial intelligence courses). I assume that the target audience of the course list has similar background knowledge. People who violate that assumption will glean more from this book.

Much of my malcontent stemmed from the framing. I expected data density (Heuristics and Biases set a high bar). I found broad shallow summaries and a lot of history. There are audiences to which I'd recommend this book (with some caveats), but it doesn't feel like it belongs in the same list as Heuristics and Biases and Bayesian Modeling and Inference.

Then again, Cognitive Science is a young field that does not yet lend itself to technicality. The type of book I was hoping for may not yet exist. And unfortunately, I'm not in a position to suggest alternatives.

I've read Kolak's Cognitive Science, which you recomended in that textbook list post. I've enjoyed it a lot and it didn't feel like I needed some previous introductory reading. Any reason why you left it out now?