How much does appearance matter in the formation of romantic relationships? Do nice guys always finish last? Does playing hard-to-get ever work? What really makes for a good chat-up line? When it comes to relationships, there's no shortage of advice from self-help 'experts', pick-up artists, and glossy magazines. But modern-day myths of attraction often have no basis in fact or - worse - are rooted in little more than misogyny. In Attraction Explained, psychologist Viren Swami debunks these myths and draws on cutting-edge research to provide a ground-breaking and evidence-based account of relationship formation. At the core of this book is a very simple idea: there are no 'laws of attraction', no foolproof methods or strategies for getting someone to date you. But this isn't to say that there's nothing to be gained from studying attraction. Based on science rather than self-help cliches, Attraction Explained looks at how factors such as geography, appearance, personality, and similarity affect who we fall for and why.

Cognitive science explores intelligence and intelligent systems. Several disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and the neurosciences, have a well-established interest in these topics. An attempt to organize and unify views of thought developed within these distinct disciplines, cognitive science is concerned with the construction of abstract theory of intelligent processes, the investigation of human and animal intelligence, and a discussion of computational principles that underlie the organization and behavior of computer programs.

This three volume set presents a careful selection of the most important articles on cognitive science, divided into the following areas:

Foundational Issues Conceptualization, Learning, & Memory Representation Problem Solving & Understanding Visual Perception Comprehension Production

Articles in these volumes have been drawn from various books and from the following journals: Science, Psychological Bulletin, The Psychology of Computer Vision, Psychological Review, Cognitive Science, Computers and Thought, Artificial Intelligence, Computers and Biomedical Research, Cognitive Psychology, Cognition, Language and Speech, and Computational Linguistics

Cognitive science explores intelligence and intelligent systems. Several disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and the neurosciences, have a well-established interest in these topics. An attempt to organize and unify views of thought developed within these distinct disciplines, cognitive science is concerned with the construction of abstract theory of intelligent processes, the investigation of human and animal intelligence, and a discussion of computational principles that underlie the organization and behavior of computer programs.

This three volume set presents a careful selection of the most important articles on cognitive science, divided into the following areas:

Foundational Issues Conceptualization, Learning, & Memory Representation Problem Solving & Understanding Visual Perception Comprehension Production

Articles in these volumes have been drawn from various books and from the following journals: Science, Psychological Bulletin, The Psychology of Computer Vision, Psychological Review, Cognitive Science, Computers and Thought, Artificial Intelligence, Computers and Biomedical Research, Cognitive Psychology, Cognition, Language and Speech, and Computational Linguistics

Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett demystify that big grey blob between your ears.

In seven short essays (plus a bite-sized story about how brains evolved), this slim, entertaining, and accessible collection reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You’ll learn where brains came from, how they’re structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience. Along the way, you’ll also learn to dismiss popular myths such as the idea of a 'lizard brain' and the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions, or even between nature and nurture, to determine your behaviour.

Sure to intrigue casual readers and scientific veterans alike, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is full of surprises, humour, and important implications for human nature - a gift of a book that you will want to savour again and again.

The scientific story of first impressions--and why the snap character judgments we make from faces are irresistible but usually incorrect We make up our minds about others after seeing their faces for a fraction of a second--and these snap judgments predict all kinds of important decisions. For example, politicians who simply look more competent are more likely to win elections. Yet the character judgments we make from faces are as inaccurate as they are irresistible; in most situations, we would guess more accurately if we ignored faces. So why do we put so much stock in these widely shared impressions? What is their purpose if they are completely unreliable? In this book, Alexander Todorov, one of the world's leading researchers on the subject, answers these questions as he tells the story of the modern science of first impressions. Drawing on psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, computer science, and other fields, this accessible and richly illustrated book describes cutting-edge research and puts it in the context of the history of efforts to read personality from faces. Todorov describes how we have evolved the ability to read basic social signals and momentary emotional states from faces, using a network of brain regions dedicated to the processing of faces. Yet contrary to the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of physiognomy and even some of today's psychologists, faces don't provide us a map to the personalities of others. Rather, the impressions we draw from faces reveal a map of our own biases and stereotypes. A fascinating scientific account of first impressions, Face Value explains why we pay so much attention to faces, why they lead us astray, and what our judgments actually tell us.

How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. In this groundbreaking work, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores exciting new theories from these fields that reveal minds like ours to be prediction machines - devices that have evolved to anticipate the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. These predictions then initiate actions that structure our worlds and alter the very things we need to engage and predict. Clark takes us on a journey in discovering the circular causal flows and the self-structuring of the environment that define "the predictive brain." What emerges is a bold, new, cutting-edge vision that reveals the brain as our driving force in the daily surf through the waves of sensory stimulation.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PHYSICS WORLD BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019 'One of the deepest and most original thinkers of his generation of cognitive scientists. His startling argument has implications for philosophy, science, and how we understand the world around us' Steven Pinker 'Is reality virtual? It's a question made even more interesting by this book' Barbara Kiser, Nature Do we see the world as it truly is? In The Case Against Reality, pioneering cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says no? we see what we need in order to survive. Our visual perceptions are not a window onto reality, Hoffman shows us, but instead are interfaces constructed by natural selection. The objects we see around us are not unlike the file icons on our computer desktops: while shaped like a small folder on our screens, the files themselves are made of a series of ones and zeros - too complex for most of us to understand. In a similar way, Hoffman argues, evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us. Yet now these illusions can be manipulated by advertising and design. Drawing on thirty years of Hoffman's own influential research, as well as evolutionary biology, game theory, neuroscience, and philosophy, The Case Against Reality makes the mind-bending yet utterly convincing case that the world is nothing like what we see through our eyes.

The ability to anticipate and make accurate decisions in a timely manner is fundamental to high-level performance in sport. This is the first book to identify the underlying science behind anticipation and decision making in sport, enhancing our scientific understanding of these phenomena and helping practitioners to develop interventions to facilitate the more rapid acquisition of the perceptual-cognitive skills that underpin these judgements. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach - encompassing research from psychology, biomechanics, neuroscience, physiology, computing science, and performance analysis - the book is divided into three sections. The first section provides a comprehensive analysis of the processes and mechanisms underpinning anticipation and skilled perception in sport. In the second section, the focus shifts towards exploring the science of decision making in sport. The final section is more applied, outlining how the key skills that impact on anticipation and decision making may be facilitated through various training interventions. With chapters written by leading experts from a vast range of countries and continents, no other book offers such a synthesis of the historical development of the field, contemporary research, and future areas for investigation in anticipation and decision making in sport. This is a fascinating and important text for students and researchers in sport psychology, skill acquisition, expert performance, motor learning, motor behaviour, and coaching science, as well as practicing coaches from any sport.

During the last three decades there have been enormous advances in our understanding of the neural mechanisms of selective attention at the network as well as the cellular level. The Oxford Handbook of Attention brings together the different research areas that constitute contemporary attention research into one comprehensive and authoritative volume. In 40 chapters, it covers the most important aspects of attention research from the areas of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, human and animal neuroscience, and computational modelling. The book is divided into six main sections. Following an introduction from Michael Posner, The Oxford Handbook of Attention begins by looking at theoretical models of attention. The next two sections are dedicated to spatial attention and non-spatial attention respectively. Within section 4, the authors consider the interactions between attention and other psychological domains. The last two sections focus on attention related disorders and on computational models of attention. A final epilogue chapter written by Nobre and Kastner summarizes the questions, methods, findings, and emerging principles of contemporary attention research. For both scholars and students, The Oxford Handbook of Attention provides a concise and state-of-the-art review of the current literature in this field.

Psychology of the Image outlines a theoretical framework bringing together the semiotic concepts developed by Charles Peirce, the sociological insights of Ervin Goffman and the psychoanalytic ideas of Jacques Lacan. Image studies in fashion, advertising, photography, film studies and psychology have been influenced by these theorists in significant ways. The framework presented helps the reader understand how these ideas relate to the study of different domains of the image: the internal imagery of dreams, external images such as the photograph and image processes which span both contexts, e.g., images we have about ourselves. The topics discussed are organised into three themes. The first considers mental imagery, including sound and dreams. The second addresses the interdependent nature of internal and external images, e.g., the gendered self and social identity. In the third theme, attention turns to external images including television, film, photography, the computer and the internet. Psychology of the Image will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates, lecturers and researchers in the fields of psychology, media studies and sociology.

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We remember in social contexts. We reminisce about the past together, collaborate to remember shared experiences, and, even when we are alone, we remember in the context of our communities and cultures. Taking an interdisciplinary approach throughout, this text comprehensively covers collaborative remembering across the fields of developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, discourse processing, philosophy, neuropsychology, design, and media studies. It highlights points of overlap and contrast across the many disciplinary perspectives and, with its sections on 'Approaches of Collaborative Remembering' and 'Applications of Collaborative Remembering', also connects basic and applied research. Written with late-stage undergraduates and early-stage graduates in mind, the book is also a valuable tool for memory specialists and academics in the fields of psychology, cognitive science and philosophy who are interested in collaborative memory research.

Cognitive Evolution provides an in-depth exploration of the history and development of cognition, from the beginning of life on Earth to present-day humans. Drawing together evolutionary and comparative research, this book presents a unique perspective on the evolution of human cognition. Adopting an information processing perspective - that is, from inputs to outputs, with all the mental processes in between, Boles provides a systematic overview of the evolutionary development of cognition and of its sensation, movement, and perception components. The book is supported by long-established evolutionary theories and backed up by a wealth of recent research from the growing field of cognitive evolution and cognitive neuroscience to provide a comprehensive text on the subject. Cognitive Evolution is an essential read for advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students of cognitive and evolutionary psychology.

The case study of John has provided a unique insight into the nature of visual agnosia and more broadly into the underlying processes which support human vision. After suffering a stroke, John had problems in recognizing common objects, faces, seeing colours, reading and finding his way around his environment. A Reader in Visual Agnosia brings together the primary scientific papers describing the detailed investigations for each visual problem which the authors carried out with John, known as patient HJA. This work was summarised initially in To See But Not To See (1987), and 26 years later in A Case Study in Visual Agnosia Revisited (2013). The chapters are divided into 6 parts corresponding to the key areas of investigation: Integrative visual agnosia Perception of global form Face perception Colour perception Word recognition Changes over time Each part contains a short introduction, written by the two leading researchers who worked with John, which highlights the relations between the papers and demonstrates the pathway of the case analysis. The book will be invaluable to students and researchers in visual cognition, cognitive neuropsychology and vision neuroscience.

The study of sensation and perception looks at how we acquire, process, and interpret information about the outside world. By describing key ideas from first principles, this straightforward introduction provides easy access to the basic concepts in the subject, and incorporates the most recent advances with useful historical background. The text takes a uniquely integrative approach, highlighting fundamental findings that apply across all the senses - including vision, hearing, touch, pain, balance, smell and taste - rather than considering each sense in isolation. Several pedagogical features help students to engage with the material. `Key Term' and `Key Concept' boxes describe technical terms and concepts whilst `Question' boxes relate the material to everyday questions about perception. Each chapter ends with suggestions for further reading, and the final chapter draws together the material from the previous chapters, summarizing the broad principles described, and outlining some major unresolved issues. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book is an accessible and up-to-date overview of the processes of human sensation and perception. Presented in full color, it is an ideal introduction for pre-undergraduate and first year undergraduate students on courses in psychology, as well as neuroscience and biology.

While the field of vision science has grown significantly in the past three decades, there have been few comprehensive books that showed readers how to adopt a computional approach to understanding visual perception, along with the underlying mechanisms in the brain. Understanding Vision explains the computational principles and models of biological visual processing, and in particular, of primate vision. The book is written in such a way that vision scientists, unfamiliar with mathematical details, should be able to conceptually follow the theoretical principles and their relationship with physiological, anatomical, and psychological observations, without going through the more mathematical pages. For those with a physical science background, especially those from machine vision, this book serves as an analytical introduction to biological vision. It can be used as a textbook or a reference book in a vision course, or a computational neuroscience course for graduate students or advanced undergraduate students. It is also suitable for self-learning by motivated readers. in addition, for those with a focused interest in just one of the topics in the book, it is feasible to read just the chapter on this topic without having read or fully comprehended the other chapters. In particular, Chapter 2 presents a brief overview of experimental observations on biological vision; Chapter 3 is on encoding of visual inputs, Chapter 5 is on visual attentional selection driven by sensory inputs, and Chapter 6 is on visual perception or decoding. Including many examples that clearly illustrate the application of computational principles to experimental observations, Understanding Vision is valuable for students and researchers in computational neuroscience, vision science, machine and computer vision, as well as physicists interested in visual processes.

A vital resource on speech and language processing in bilingual adults and children The Listening Bilingual brings together in one volume the various components of spoken language processing in bilingual adults, infants and children. The book includes a review of speech perception and word recognition; syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of speech processing; the perception and comprehension of bilingual mixed speech (code-switches, borrowings and interferences); and the assessment of bilingual speech perception and comprehension in adults and children in the clinical context. The two main authors as well as selected guest authors, Mark Antoniou, Theres Gruter, Robert J. Hartsuiker, Elizabeth D. Pena and Lisa M. Bedore, and Lu-Feng Shi, introduce the various approaches used in the study of spoken language perception and comprehension in bilingual individuals. The authors focus on experimentation that involves both well-established tasks and newer tasks, as well as techniques used in brain imaging. This important resource: Is the first of its kind to concentrate specifically on spoken language processing in bilingual adults and children. Offers a unique text that covers both fundamental and applied research in bilinguals. Covers a range of topics including speech perception, spoken word recognition, higher level processing, code-switching, and assessment. Presents information on the assessment of bilingual children's language development Written for advanced undergraduate students in linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and speech/language pathology as well as researchers, The Listening Bilingual offers a state-of-the-art review of the recent developments and approaches in speech and language processing in bilingual people of all ages.

This two volume set brings together the key research articles and papers on our basic attentional limitations when listening to two messages spoken at once and the major opposing theories which have sought to account for these limitations. It also includes the evidence which has been used to attempt to distinguish between these theories as well as contemporary analyses of the role of attention in the regulation of verbal and non-verbal behaviour. In addition to milestone research papers which set out our attentional limitations and the major explanations of these limitations, the articles in these two volumes represent contemporary investigations of attention and consciousness by experimental psychologists.

Perceptual organization comprises a wide range of processes such as perceptual grouping, figure-ground organization, filling-in, completion, perceptual switching, etc. Such processes are most notable in the context of shape perception but they also play a role in texture perception, lightness perception, color perception, motion perception, depth perception, etc. Perceptual organization deals with a variety of perceptual phenomena of central interest, studied from many different perspectives, including psychophysics, experimental psychology, neuropsychology, neuroimaging, neurophysiology, and computational modeling. Given its central importance in phenomenal experience, perceptual organization has also figured prominently in classic Gestalt writings on the topic, touching upon deep philosophical issues regarding mind-brain relationships and consciousness. In addition, it attracts a great deal of interest from people working in applied areas like visual art, design, architecture, music, and so forth. The Oxford Handbook of Perceptual Organization provides a broad and extensive review of the current literature, written in an accessible form for scholars and students. With chapter written by leading researchers in the field, this is the state-of-the-art reference work on this topic, and will be so for many years to come.

Auditory Sound Transmission provides an integrated, state-of-the-art description and quantitative analysis of sound transmission from the outer ear to the sensory cells in the cochlea of the inner ear. It describes in detail the structures and mechanisms involved and gives their input and transmission characteristics. It shows how sound transmission in one part of the ear depends on the input characteristics of the next part and how sound is analyzed in the inner ear before it reaches the nervous system. The book is divided into seven chapters. The first gives the general overview of the path of sound in the ear. The second concerns the acoustics of the outer ear which is important not only for sound transmission in the ear but also for the design and calibration of earphones, as well as for clinical and research measurements of sound pressure in the ear canal. The third chapter analyzes the middle ear function which is crucial for adapting the conditions of sound propagation in the air to those in the inner ear fluids. The middle ear is prone to various malfunctions, and it is shown how they change the acoustic conditions measured in the ear canal and can be diagnosed on this basis. The next three chapters are dedicated to the most intricate mechanical part of the auditory system, the cochlea. Because of its complexity, its function is explained in three steps: first, with the help of simplifications produced by death; second, on the basis of the measured characteristics of the live organ; third, with the help of quantitative analysis. The last chapter describes cochlear mechanisms underlying pitch and loudness perception.

Perceiving the Affordances is a personal history and intellectual autobiography of Eleanor Gibson, the groundbreaking research psychologist who was influential in the founding of the theory of perceptual development. It is also a biography of her husband, James J. Gibson, who was a major perceptual theorist and the founder of the ecologically-oriented theory of perception. This is the story of their lives together and how each came to make particular contributions. This book is of interest to people who study perception, perceptual development, infancy, developmental psychology, and the history of psychology.

This book is a testimony to Evgeny Nikolaevich Sokolov's years of work in developing knowledge in the areas of perception, information processing and attention, and to the research it has spawned. It presents a historical account of a research program, leading the reader toward a cognitive science approach to the study of perception and attention. An understanding of neuroscience and mathematical modeling are helpful prerequisites. The co-authors collected data on orienting, attention, and information processing in the brain using single-cell recordings, central, autonomic, cognitive, behavioral, and verbal measures. This commonality brought them together for a series of meetings which resulted in the production of this book. The book ends with a review of some of the co-authors studies that have developed from or in parallel with Sokolov's research. They investigate, in particular, the concepts of attention and anticipation using a psychophysiological methodology.

Since 1991, the edited book series Studies in Perception and Action has appeared in conjunction with the biennial International Conference of Perception and Action (ICPA). ICPA provides a forum for researchers and academics who share a common interest in ecological psychology to come together, present new research, and foster ideas towards the advancement of the field. This volume highlights research presented at the 17th ICPA meeting in the summer of 2013. The short papers and empirical articles presented in this book represent the contributions of researchers and laboratories from across the globe. The reader will find new, cutting-edge research on a wide variety of topics in perception and action. This volume will especially appeal to those that are interested in James J. Gibson's ecological approach to psychology, as well as, more broadly, students and researchers of visual and haptic perception, perceptual development, human movement dynamics, human factors, and social processes.

This book collects both classic and contemporary articles in visual perception, providing the reader with an overview of key research ideas as they first appeared. The articles span a century of research: the earliest was published in 1894, the most recent in 1997. There are examples from each of the many disciplines that have contributed to our current understanding of vision, including experimental psychology, cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, and functional neuroimaging. The topics include theoretical perspectives, early vision, perceptual organization and constancy, object and spatial vision, and visual attention and awareness. A brief introduction to each article by the editor provides an intellectual context and pointers to subsequent developments. Suggestions for further reading and discussion questions provide a framework for students to strengthen their understanding of different topics.

This book will be an excellent source of supplementary readings in an advanced undergraduate or graduate course in vision, or a stand-alone text for an in-depth graduate seminar. Professionals in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, visual science, and cognitive science will find this a valuable addition to their personal libraries.

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Does the world appear the same to everyone? Does what we know determine what we see? Why do we see the world as we do? Vision is our most dominant sense. From the light that enters our eyes to the complex cognitive processes that follow, we derive most of our information about what things are, where they are, and how they move from our vision. Visual Perception takes a refreshingly different approach to this enigmatic sense. From the function that vision serves for an active observer, to the history of visual perception itself the third edition has been extensively revised, updated and expanded, while still preserving the essential features of historical context, neurophysiology and independent thought that made the earlier editions so engaging. Covering the perception of location, motion, object recognition and with up-to-date information on the workings of the visual brain, the 3rd edition looks at how our ideas have been shaped, not just by psychology, but by art, optics, biology and philosophy. The emphasis on understanding vision as a basis for action in the real world has also been expanded to cover seeing representations of all sorts, whether they are pictures or computer-generated displays. The 3rd Edition of Visual Perception is a readable, accessible and truly relevant introduction to the world of perception and will be welcomed by students of visual perception as well as anyone with a general interest in the mysteries and wonder of vision.

How do we recognise familiar faces?
What factors determine facial attractiveness?
How does face processing develop in infants and children?
Why do face reconstruction systems, such as Photofit and E-Fit, produce such poor likenesses of the original face?
Face Processing: psychological, neuropsychological and applied perspectives is the first major textbook for 20 years that seeks to answer questions like these. Drawing on the most recent research in the field, and organised around the three main research perspectives - psychological, neuropsychological, and applied - it provides insights on issues of relevance to students from a wide range of disciplines.
Face recognition and expression perception have generated a large amount of research over the last decade, and with high profile media coverage of related issues, such as the misidentification of Brazilian student, Jean Charles de Menezes, face processing is a hot topic within the study of psychology. Face Processing captures the excitement in the field, and with reference to a wealth of studies and real-world phenomena, it reveals how our understanding of face processing has developed over the years.
The first section of the book, on the psychological perspectives of face processing, considers how we are able to recognise familiar faces; how we can extract information such as emotion, sex and age from a face; and how face processing abilities develop.
The second section covers the neuropsychological perspectives, and examines the disorders of face recognition that arise following brain injury, and asks whether faces are a 'special' class of visual stimuli.
Finally, a section on the applied perspectives of face processing describes face reconstruction systems, such as Identikit and Photofit, and their limitations; it discusses methods of constructing facial composites, and the phenomenon of 'verbal overshadowing', whereby verbal descriptions of visual stimuli subsequently leads to a temporary impairment in people's ability to recognise those stimuli.
Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, this book is the perfect resource for students studying face processing as part of a psychology degree, and the breadth of its coverage makes it of relevance to computer science students, medical students with an interest in neurology, and students of forensic science, too.
Online Resource Centre
The Online Resource Centre to accompany Face Processing: psychological, neuropsychological, and applied perspectives features the following resources for lecturers and students.
For registered adopters
Figures from the book available to download
For students
Hyperlinks to primary literature articles
Web link library