Vision and the Visual System offers students, teachers, and researchers a rigorous, yet accessible account of how the brain analyzes the visual scene. Schiller and Tehovnik describe key aspects of visual perception while explaining the relationship between eye movements and the neural structures in the brain, which play a central role in how we process visual information. The book discusses various brain areas involved in processing information, focusing on the evolutionary origins and mechanics behind the several parallel pathways that compose the visual system. Later chapters explain how the nervous system processes the perception of color, motion, depth, and patterns. A variety of illusions are on display in Chapter 14, where the authors provide detailed explanations that deconstruct how the visual system operates to create them. The volume concludes with a discussion of recent attempts to build visual prosthetic devices for blind individuals, of which there are more than 40 million in the world. Vision and the Visual System is based on Professor Schiller's more than 40 years of experience teaching vision courses at MIT, and is tailored especially for college undergraduates and graduate students interested in visual perception and the operations of the visual system.

For thousands of years, one scientific puzzle has fascinated and perplexed the greatest philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, and psychologists - why do the moon and sun appear so much larger on the horizon than when high up in the sky? Now, two leading psychologists have provided a compelling account of this fascinating illusion. Taking us through the history, the characters involved, the attempts made to explain the illusion, through to modern day studies of visual perception, the book is the most comprehensive account of this puzzle so far. This is a work which will remain, for some time to come, the definitive book on a mystery that has fascinated and tested the greatest minds throughout the ages. Accessibly written, it will appeal to readers of popular science, along with those within the disciplines of psychology, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, from undergraduate upwards.

Perceiving in Depth is a sequel to Binocular Vision and Stereopsis and to Seeing in Depth, both by Ian P. Howard and Brian J. Rogers. This three-volume work is much broader in scope than previous texts and includes mechanisms of depth perception by all senses, including aural, electrosensory organs, and the somatosensory system. The work contains three extensively illustrated and referenced volumes. Volume 1 reviews sensory coding, psychophysical and analytic procedures, and basic visual mechanisms. Volume 2 reviews stereoscopic vision. Volume 3 reviews all mechanisms of depth perception other than stereoscopic vision. Together, these three volumes provide the most detailed review of all aspects of perceiving the three-dimensional world. Volume 1 contains a historical background and address basic coding process, an account of basic psychophysical procedures and principles of sensory coding, and an account of basic mechanisms underlying visual depth perception. It starts with a review of the history of investigations of visual depth perception from the ancient Greeks to the early 20th century. Depth-detection mechanisms in senses other than vision were not investigated before the 19th century. Special attention is devoted to the discovery of the principles of perspective in 15th century Florence, and the discovery of the principles of stereoscopic vision. The chapter ends with a review of early visual display systems, such as panoramas and peepshows, and the discovery and development of stereoscopes and stereophotography. One chapter reviews the psychophysical and analytic procedures used in behavioral investigations of depth perception. Another chapter deals with the broad topic of sensory coding, including the geometry of visual space, mechanisms of attention, and experience-dependent plasticity of visual functions. A review of the structure and physiology of the primate visual system proceeds from the eye through the LGN to the visual cortex and higher visual centers. This is followed by a review of the early evolution of visual systems and of the development of the mammalian visual system in the embryo and post-natal period, with an emphasis on mechanisms of neural plasticity. The development of perceptual functions, especially depth perception, in human infants is then reviewed. These chapters provide a foundation for a review of the effects of early visual deprivation during the critical period of neural plasticity on the development of the various types of amblyopia and of defects in visual depth perception. Various forms of deprivation are discussed, including dark rearing, binocular and monocular enucleation, strabismus, and eyelid suturing. Volume 1 ends with reviews of the accommodation mechanism of the human eye and vergence eye movements.

Eye movements are a vital part of our interaction with the world. They play a pivotal role in perception, cognition, and education. Research in this field is now proceeding at a considerable pace and casting new light on how the eyes move and what information we can derive during the frequent and brief periods of fixation. However, the origins of this work are less well known, even though much of our knowledge was derived from this research with far more primitive equipment. This book is unique in tracing the history of eye movement research. It shows how great strides were made in this area before modern recording devices were available, especially in the measurement of nystagmus. When photographic techniques were adapted to measure discontinuous eye movements, from about 1900, many of the issues that are now basic to modern research were then investigated. One of the earliest cognitive tasks examined was reading, and it remains in the vanguard of contemporary research. Modern researchers in this field will be astonished at the subtleties of these early experimental studies and the ingenuity of interpretations that were advanced one and even two centuries ago. Though physicians often carried out the original eye movement research, later on it was pursued by psychologists - it is within contemporary neuroscience that we find these two strands reunited. Anyone interested in the origins of psychology and neuroscience will find much to stimulate and surprise them in this valuable new work.

'By the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin' Daniel Gilbert, author of the bestseller Stumbling on Happiness

'Fascinating . . . a thought-provoking journey into emotion science' The Wall Street Journal

'This meticulous, well-researched, and deeply thought out book provides information about our emotions - what they are, where they come from, why we have them. For anyone who has struggled to reconcile brain and heart, this book will be a treasure; it explains the science without short-changing the humanism of its topic' Andrew Solomon, bestselling author of Far From the Tree and The Noonday Demon

When you feel anxious, angry, happy, or surprised, what's really going on inside of you?

Many scientists believe that emotions come from a specific part of the brain, triggered by the world around us. The thrill of seeing an old friend, the fear of losing someone we love - each of these sensations seems to arise automatically and uncontrollably from within us, finding expression on our faces and in our behaviour, carrying us away with the experience.

This understanding of emotion has been around since Plato. But what if it is wrong? In How Emotions Are Made, pioneering psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett draws on the latest scientific evidence to reveal that our common-sense ideas about emotions are dramatically, even dangerously, out of date - and that we have been paying the price. Emotions aren't universally pre-programmed in our brains and bodies; rather they are psychological experiences that each of us constructs based on our unique personal history, physiology and environment.

This new view of emotions has serious implications: when judges issue lesser sentences for crimes of passion, when police officers fire at threatening suspects, or when doctors choose between one diagnosis and another, they're all, in some way, relying on the ancient assumption that emotions are hardwired into our brains and bodies. Revising that conception of emotion isn't just good science, Barrett shows; it's vital to our well-being and the health of society itself.

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.

Originally published in 1976, the bibliography presented here was intended to provide a useful research tool for scholars and students of perception. The primary concentration of the authors' efforts has been on the philosophical literature during the period of 1935-1974.

The importance of facial expressions has led to a steadily growing body of empirical findings and theoretical analyses. Every decade has seen work that extends or challenges previous thinking on facial expression. The Science of Facial Expression provides an updated review of the current psychology of facial expression . This book summarizes current conclusions and conceptual frameworks from leading figures who have shaped the field in their various subfields, and will therefore be of interest to practitioners, students, and researchers of emotion in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, biology, anthropology, linguistics, affective computing, and homeland security. Organized in eleven thematic sections, The Science of Facial Expression offers a broad perspective of the "geography" of the science of facial expression. It reviews the scientific history of emotion perception and the evolutionary origins and functions of facial expression. It includes an updated compilation on the great debate around Basic Emotion Theory versus Behavioral Ecology and Psychological constructionism. The developmental psychology and social psychology of facial expressions is explored in the role of facial expressions in child development, social interactions, and culture. The book also covers appraisal theory, concepts, neural and behavioral processes, and lesser-known facial behaviors such as yawing, vocal crying, and vomiting. In addition, the book reflects that research on the "expression of emotion" is moving towards a significance of context in the production and interpretation of facial expression The authors expose various fundamental questions and controversies yet to be resolved, but in doing so, open many sources of inspiration to pursue in the scientific study of facial expression.

This book covers all aspects of the visual system from sensory aspects to eye movements, attention, and visual memory. There are many books that cover the psychology and physiology of a single aspect of vision, such as color vision or eye movements. Other larger texts may offer encyclopedic coverage of the psychology of all aspects of vision. However, this is the only book on the market covering the psychology, anatomy, and physiology of all aspects of the visual system in 300 pages. Each chapter addresses a separate aspect of vision, describing the basic phenomena, where in the brain this aspect of vision occurs, the properties of the cells in those areas, and the deficits that result from a lesion or stroke in those areas. In addition to extensive illustrations, the book contains the author's selection of the literature, from the classic 19th century papers to the present. This text is designed for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in psychology, optometry, physiology, anatomy, and medicine who want to get a broad view rather than one confined to their particular discipline.

In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of the most fertile areas for new work. Perceptual Experience presents new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics dealing with sensation and representation, consciousness and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge and between perception and action. This will be the book on the philosophy of perception, a fascinating resource for philosophers and psychologists.

Making a Machine That Sees Like Us explains why and how our visual perceptions can provide us with an accurate representation of the external world. Along the way, it tells the story of a machine (a computational model) built by the authors that solves the computationally difficult problem of seeing the way humans do. This accomplishment required a radical paradigm shift - one that challenged preconceptions about visual perception and tested the limits of human behavior-modeling for practical application.
The text balances scientific sophistication and compelling storytelling, making it accessible to both technical and general readers. Online demonstrations and references to the authors' previously published papers detail how the machine was developed and what drove the ideas needed to make it work. The authors contextualize their new theory of shape perception by highlighting criticisms and opposing theories, offering readers a fascinating account not only of their revolutionary results, but of the scientific process that guided the way.

In "Mind and Maze: Spatial Cognition and Environmental Behavior," Ann Sloan Devlin takes the reader on a journey from the crib to the city, examining at each life phase the development of how we know where we are in space and our appreciation of spatial relationships. The author explores gender differences in spatial cognition, the parts of the brain that handle spatial relationships, and the principles that mapmakers and others use to create navigational aids, all in an effort to better identify the connection between certain behaviors and their relevance to real-world tasks. This book offers students, researchers, architects, and policy makers a fuller appreciation of spatial cognition and its impact on society.

Devlin examines a fundamental aspect of human behavior, that we are animals for whom functioning in space is essential to our survival, in a uniquely interdisciplinary way. Rather than narrowly limit her focus to a specific area of psychology, she discusses spatial cognition from many perspectives, from urban planning and architecture to developmental psychology and neuroscience. This book offers students, researchers, architects, and policy makers a fuller appreciation of spatial cognition and its impact on society.

Historical analysis reveals that perceptual theories and models are doomed to relatively short lives. The most popular contemporary theories in perceptual science do not have as wide an acceptance among researchers as do some of those in other sciences. To understand these difficulties, the authors of the present volume explore the conceptual and philosophical foundations of perceptual science. Based on logical analyses of various problems, theories, and models, they offer a number of reasons for the current weakness of perceptual explanations. New theoretical approaches are also proposed. At the end of each chapter, dicussants contribute to the conclusions by critically examining the authors' ideas and analyses.

This volume of collected papers, with the accompanying essays by the editors, is the definitive source book for the work of this important experimental psychologist. Originally published in 1991, it offered previously inaccessible essays by Albert Michotte on phenomenal causality, phenomenal permanence, phenomenal reality, and perception and cognition. Within these four sections are the most significant and representative of the Belgian psychologist's research in the area of experimental phenomenology. Extremely insightful introductions by the editors are included that place the essays in context. Michotte's ideas have played an important role in much research on the development of perception, and his work on social perception continues to be influential in social psychology. The book also includes some lesser-known aspects of his work that are equally important; for example, a remarkable set of articles on pictorial analysis.

Our visual system can process information at both conscious and unconscious levels. Understanding the factors that control whether a stimulus reaches our awareness, and the fate of those stimuli that remain at an unconscious level, are the major challenges of brain science in the new millennium. Since its publication in 1984, Visual Masking has established itself as a classic text in the field of cognitive psychology. In the years since, there have been considerable advances in the cognitive neurosciences, and a growth of interest in the topic of consciousness, and the time is ripe for a new edition of this text. Where most current approaches to the study of visual consciousness adopt a 'steady-state' view, the approach presented in this book explores its dynamic properties. This new edition uses the technique of visual masking to explore temporal aspects of conscious and unconscious processes down to a resolution in the millisecond range. The 'time slices' through conscious and unconscious vision revealed by the visual masking technique can shed light on both normal and abnormal operations in the brain. The main focus of this book is on the microgenesis of visual form and pattern perception - microgenesis referring to the processes occurring in the visual system from the time of stimulus presentation on the retinae to the time, a few hundred milliseconds later, of its registration at conscious or unconscious perceptual and behavioural levels. The book takes a highly integrative approach by presenting microgenesis within a broad context encompassing visuo-temporal phenomena, attention, and consciousness.

This volume takes a contemporary and novel look at how people see the world around them. We generally believe we see our surroundings and everything in them with complete accuracy. However, as the contributions to this volume argue, this assumption is wrong: people's view of their world is cloudy at best. Social Psychology of Visual Perception is a thorough examination of the nature and determinants of visual perception, which integrates work on social psychology and vision. It is the first broad-based volume to integrate specific sub-areas into the study of vision, including goals and wishes, sex and gender, emotions, culture, race, and age. The volume tackles a range of engaging issues, such as what is happening in the brain when people look at attractive faces, or if the way our eyes move around influences how happy we are and could help us reduce stress. It reveals that sexual desire, our own sexual orientation, and our race affect what types of people capture our attention. It explores whether our brains and eyes work differently when we are scared or disgusted, or when we grow up in Asia rather than North America. The multiple perspectives in the book will appeal to researchers and students in range of disciplines, including social psychology, cognition, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience.

Mark Eli Kalderon presents an original study in the philosophy of perception written in the medium of historiography. He considers the phenomenology and metaphysics of sensory presentation through the examination of an ancient aporia. Specifically, he argues that a puzzle about perception at a distance is behind Empedocles' theory of vision. Empedocles conceives of perception as a mode of material assimilation, but this raises a puzzle about color vision, since color vision seems to present colors that inhere in distant objects. But if the colors inhere in distant objects how can they be taken in by the organ of sight and so be palpable to sense? Aristotle purports to resolve this puzzle in his definition of perception as the assimilation of sensible form without the matter of the perceived particular. Aristotle explicitly criticizes Empedocles, though he is keen to retain the idea that perception is a mode of assimilation, if not a material mode. Aristotle's notorious definition has long puzzled commentators. Kalderon shows how, read in light of Empedoclean puzzlement about the sensory presentation of remote objects, Aristotle's definition of perception can be better understood. Moreover, when so read, the resulting conception of perception is both attractive and defensible.

The disciplines of cognitive neuroscience, development, and psychopathology are complementary in the study of human perception and attention, even though each discipline emerges from a decidedly different and sometimes incompatible worldview. The meeting of researchers across these disciplines results in a fruitful cross-fertilization that ultimately leads to better science within each discipline and a joint scientific endeavor that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Cognitive Neuroscience, Development, and Psychopathology: Typical and Atypical Developmental Trajectories of Attention unites scholars sharing common interests in the development of attention and related areas of functioning with different perspectives and methodologies. The volume does not impose a single framework for discussing the relevant issues, but rather the authors highlight the importance of their own approaches to the study of the typical and atypical development of attention. Drs. Burack, Enns, and Fox have organized the chapters into three sections: Atypical Environments, Threat, and the Development of Individual Differences in Attention; The Organization of the Development of Attention in Typical and Atypical Processing; and The Case of Orienting Attention in Developing an Integrated Science. Discussion topics include cognitive bias modification, attention and the development of anxiety disorders, deficient anchoring, reflexive and abnormal social orienting in autism, and social attention. This volume is a unique and critical resource for researchers in communication disorders, developmental and cognitive psychology, human development, neuroscience, and educational and counseling psychology.

Although current debates in epistemology and philosophy of mind show a renewed interest in perceptual illusions, there is no systematic work in the philosophy of perception and in the psychology of perception with respect to the concept of illusion and the relation between illusion and error. This book aims to fill that gap.

Every time you consult a calendar or clock, other people are thinking for you. Most users of these tools only know how to interpret the representations of time these objects provide, not the logics behind the representations. Those logics were others' ideas. This book looks at how the objects we use to think about time shape our thoughts. Such objects empower us to think about time certain ways, but they also contain hidden assumptions about time that deflect our awareness away from the complicated rhythms of our lives and our world. Because time ties together so many aspects of our lives, this book is able to explore the nexus of objects, cognition, culture, and even biology, and to do so in relationship to

This book follows a successful symposium organized in June 2009 at the Human Brain Mapping conference. The topic is at the crossroads of two domains of increasing importance and appeal in the neuroimaging/neuroscience community: multi-modal integration, and social neuroscience. Most of our social interactions involve combining information from both the face and voice of other persons: speech information, but also crucial nonverbal information on the person's identity and affective state. The cerebral bases of the multimodal integration of speech have been intensively investigated; by contrast only few studies have focused on nonverbal aspects of face-voice integration. This work highlights recent advances in investigations of the behavioral and cerebral bases of face-voice multimodal integration in the context of person perception, focusing on the integration of affective and identity information. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective.

* Draws on work across multiple disciplines, from astrobiology and physics to linguistics and the social sciences, making it appealing to graduates from a wide variety of fields. * The first accessible introduction into the important work of philosopher Howard Pattee. * Aims to equip readers with new approaches to simple and complex systems theory to take into any respective discipline.

This volume is about the many ways we perceive. In nineteen new essays, philosophers and cognitive scientists explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. They consider how the senses extract perceptual content from receptoral information and what kinds of objects we perceive and whether multiple senses ever perceive a single event. Questions pertaining to how many senses we have, what makes one sense distinct from another, and whether and why distinguishing senses may be useful feature prominently. Contributors examine the extent to which the senses act in concert, rather than as discrete modalities, and whether this influence is epistemically pernicious, neutral, or beneficial. Many of the essays engage with the idea that it is unduly restrictive to think of perception as a collation of contents provided by individual sense modalities. Rather, contributors contend that to understand perception properly we need to build into our accounts the idea that the senses work together. In doing so, they aim to develop better paradigms for understanding the senses and thereby to move toward a better understanding of perception.

The distinguished contributors to this volume have been set the problem of describing how we know where to move our eyes. There is a great deal of current interest in the use of eye movement recordings to investigate various mental processes. The common theme is that variations in eye movements indicate variations in the processing of what is being perceived, whether in reading, driving or scene perception. However, a number of problems of interpretation are now emerging, and this edited volume sets out to address these problems. The book investigates controversies concerning the variations in eye movements associated with reading ability, concerning the extent to which text is used by the guidance mechanism while reading, concerning the relationship between eye movements and the control of other body movements, the relationship between what is inspected and what is perceived, and concerning the role of visual control attention in the acquisition of complex perceptual-motor skills, in addition to the nature of the guidance mechanism itself.
The origins of the volume are in discussions held at a meeting of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP) that was held in Wurzburg in September 1996. The discussions concerned the landing effect in reading, an effect, that if substantiated, would provide evidence of the use of parafoveal information in eye guidance, and these discussions were explored in more detail at a small meeting in Chamonix, in February 1997. Many of the contributors to this volume were present at the meeting, but the arguments were not resolved in Chamonix either. Other leaders in the field were invited to contribute to the discussion, and this volume is the product. The argument remains unresolved, but the problem is certainly clearer.

Psychological research using time as a variable has been extensive since the era of Wundt and Ebbinghaus. The care of and research on dementia patients highlights a unique need for understanding and applying the concepts of time and space. This volume, unique in its development of a model for time-space orientation, proposes that understanding the needs of these patients is increased by consideration of the DEGREESIdis DEGREESRorientation caused by dementia. Included is a review of the history of time and time measurement, a survey of psychological literature using time as a variable across the life span, and a model of time orientation applied to persons who have developed dementia.

Conditions leading to dementia are described, and a rationale proposed for the effects of time/space disorientation in behavioral disturbances. Suggestions for applications and future research are included. Scholars and researchers interested in time awareness and orientation, as well as professionals in psychology, sociology, and gerontology caring for dementia patients, will find the material here useful.