This book provides an up-to-date and accessible overview of the hottest and most influential contemporary debates in philosophy of perception, written especially for this volume by many of the most important philosophers of the field. The book addresses the following key questions: Can perception be unconscious? What is the relation between perception and attention? What properties can we perceive? Are perceptual states representations? How is vision different from the other sense modalities (like hearing or smell)? How do these sense modalities interact with one another? Contributors are Ned Block, Berit Brogaard, Alex Byrne, Robert Kentridge, John Kulvicki, Heather Logue, Mohan Matthen, Bence Nanay, Matt Nudds, Casey O'Callaghan, Adam Pautz, Ian Phillips, Susanna Siegel and Wayne Wu.

Vision dominates philosophical thinking about perception, and theorizing about experience in cognitive science has traditionally focused on a visual model. In a radical departure from established practice, Casey O'Callaghan provides a systematic treatment of sound and sound experience, and shows how thinking about audition and appreciating the relationships between multiple sense modalities can enrich our understanding of perception and the mind.
Sounds proposes a novel theory of sounds and auditory perception. Against the widely accepted philosophical view that sounds are among the secondary or sensible qualities, O'Callaghan argues that, on any perceptually plausible account, sounds are events. But this does not imply that sounds are waves that propagate through a medium, such as air or water. Rather, sounds are events that take place in one's environment at or near the objects and happenings that bring them about. This account captures the way in which sounds essentially are creatures of time, and situates sounds in a world populated by items and events that have significance for us. Sounds are not ethereal, mysterious entities.
O'Callaghan's account of sounds and their perception discloses far greater variety among the kinds of things we perceive than traditional views acknowledge. But more importantly, investigating sounds and audition demonstrates that considering other sense modalities teaches what we could not otherwise learn from thinking exclusively about the visual. Sounds articulates a powerful account of echoes, reverberation, Doppler effects, and perceptual constancies that surpasses the explanatory richness of alternative theories, and also reveals a number ofsurprising cross-modal perceptual illusions. O'Callaghan argues that such illusions demonstrate that the perceptual modalities cannot be completely understood in isolation, and that the visuocentric model for theorizing about perception --according to which perceptual modalities are discrete modes of experience and autonomous domains of philosophical and scientific inquiry--ought to be abandoned.

Our experience of objects (and consequently our theorizing about them) is very rich. We perceive objects as possessing individuation conditions. They appear to have boundaries in space and time, for example, and they appear to move independently of a background of other objects or a landscape. In Ontology Without Boundaries Jody Azzouni undertakes an analysis of our concept of object, and shows what about that notion is truly due to the world and what about it is a projection onto the world of our senses and thinking. Location and individuation conditions are our product: there is no echo of them in the world. Features, the ways that objects seem to be, aren't projections. Azzouni shows how the resulting austere metaphysics tames a host of ancient philosophical problems about constitution ("Ship of Theseus," "Sorities"), as well as contemporary puzzles about reductionism. In addition, it's shown that the same sorts of individuation conditions for properties, which philosophers use to distinguish between various kinds of odd abstracta-universals, tropes, and so on, are also projections. Accompanying our notion of an object is a background logic that makes cogent ontological debate about anything from Platonic objects to Bigfoot. Contemporary views about this background logic ("quantifier variance") make ontological debate incoherent. Azzouni shows how a neutral interpretation of quantifiers and quantifier domains makes sense of both philosophical and pre-philosophical ontological debates. Azzouni also shows how the same apparatus makes sense of our speaking about a host of items-Mickey Mouse, unicorns, Martians-that nearly all of us deny exist. It's allowed by what Azzouni shows about the background logic of our ontological debates, as well as the semantics of the language of those debates that we can disagree over the existence of things, like unicorns, without that background logic and semantics forcing ontological commitments onto speakers that they don't have.

External representations (pictures, diagrams, graphs, concrete models) have always been valuable tools for the science teacher. The formation of personal, internal, representations - visualizations - from them plays a key role in all learning, especially in that of science. The use of personal computers and sophisticated software has expanded into the areas of simulation, virtual reality, and animation, and students now engage in the creation of models, a key aspect of scientific methodology. Several academic disciplines underlie these developments, yet act independently of each other, to the detriment of an attainment of what is possible. This book brings together the insights of practicing scientists, science education researchers, computer specialists, and cognitive scientists, to produce a coherent overview.

How can we best describe the processes by which we visually perceive our environment? Contemporary perceptual theory still lacks a coherent theoretical position that encompasses both the limitations on the information that can be retained from a single eye fixation and the abundant phenomenal and behavioral evidence for the perception of an extended and coherent world. As a result, many leading theorists and researchers in visual perception are turning with new or renewed interest to the work of Julian Hochberg.
For over 50 years, in his own experimental research, in his detailed consideration of examples drawn from a wide range of visual experiences and activities, and most of all in his brilliant and sophisticated theoretical analyses, Hochberg has persistently engaged with the myriad problems inherent in working out the kind of coherent theoretical position the field currently lacks. The complexity of his thought and the wide range of areas into which Hochberg has pursued the solution to this central problem have, however, limited both the accessibility of his work and the appreciation of his accomplishment.
In this volume we seek to bring the full range of Hochberg's work to the attention of a wider audience by offering a selection of his key works, many taken from out-of-print or relatively inaccessible sources. To facilitate the understanding of his accomplishment, and of what his work has to offer to contemporary researchers and theorists in visual perception, we include commentaries on salient aspects of his work by 20 noted researchers.
In the Mind's Eye will be of interest to researchers working on topics such as perceptual organization, visual attention, spaceperception, motion perception, visual cognition, the relationship between perception and action, picture perception, and film, who are striving to obtain a deeper understanding of their own fields, and who want to integrate this understanding into a broader, unified view of visual perceptual processing.

Originally published in 1981, this volume presents the domain of personality as a fuzzy set that includes features previously identified with cognitive and social psychology. Few of the individual contributions are centrally concerned with individual differences and cross-situational stability, but these traditional themes certainly appear in several of the chapters. The remaining chapters deal with the general processes mediating the interaction between the person and the social environment, filling out the fuzzy set of personality psychology. Part 1 seeks to locate contemporary trends in the cognitive psychology of personality against a backdrop of historical events. The chapters in Part 2 discuss some of the cognitive processes mediating social behaviour. Part 3 contains contributions concerned with the rules by which people make judgments about objects in the social world. The self, a dominant topic in personality theory and research, is treated extensively in Part 4. Although many of the chapters are explicitly concerned with the relations between cognition and action - after all, most human interaction takes the form of judgments and communication - the contributions in Part 5 make the links to overt behaviour. Finally, Part 6 offers two discussions of the previous contributions from the perspective of cognitive psychology.

This collection of essays brings together research on sense modalities in general and spatial perception in particular in a systematic and interdisciplinary way. It updates a long-standing philosophical fascination with this topic by incorporating theoretical and empirical research from cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. The book is divided thematically to cover a wide range of established and emerging issues. Part I covers notions of objectivity and subjectivity in spatial perception and thinking. Part II focuses on the canonical distal senses, such as vision and audition. Part III concerns the chemical senses, including olfaction and gustation. Part IV discusses bodily awareness, peripersonal space, and touch. Finally, the volume concludes with Part V on multimodality. Spatial Senses is an important contribution to the scholarly literature on the philosophy of perception that takes into account important advances in the sciences.

Based on extensive interviews with expert facilitators from around the world and grounded in empirical evidence, Group Therapy for Voice Hearers includes numerous tips, strategies, case examples, and reflection questions to bring the material to life in a practical way. Chapters address the need for practical, accessible training in how to facilitate sessions and identify six key factors that lead to a successful session: safety, flexibility, empowerment, the integration of lived experience, self-awareness, and attention to the needs of the group process. This book is an important resource for mental health professionals working with clients who hear voices.

Based on extensive interviews with expert facilitators from around the world and grounded in empirical evidence, Group Therapy for Voice Hearers includes numerous tips, strategies, case examples, and reflection questions to bring the material to life in a practical way. Chapters address the need for practical, accessible training in how to facilitate sessions and identify six key factors that lead to a successful session: safety, flexibility, empowerment, the integration of lived experience, self-awareness, and attention to the needs of the group process. This book is an important resource for mental health professionals working with clients who hear voices.

In this book a leading researcher and artist explores how we see pictures and how they can communicate messages to us, both directly and indirectly by making allusions to objects in space or to stored images in our minds. Originally published in 1990, Dr Wade provides fascinating examples of pictures that communicate hidden messages, either by implying something else, or by a shape or portrait which is carried covertly within another design. He analyses image processing stages in vision, demonstrating that the various stages may be related to styles in representational art. He shows how the way we have been taught to look at and recognise objects, affects the way we see them. The book lavishly illustrates with original examples of visual allusions and includes detailed practical advice on how photographers and designers can create them. Essential reading for photographers, designers, artists, people in film and television, and anyone involved in visual science , visual communication and advertising.

Originally published in 1978, the laws and procedures governing person identification parades, photofit pictures and the forms of questions asked to obtain a description, had been increasingly called into question. The problem had been highlighted by several well publicised court cases, and considered by the Devlin Committee. This book reviews the status of psychological knowledge at the time concerning the many aspects of person identification and scientifically evaluates the methods and procedures used. Contrary to the popular belief that identification is a simple affair, the authors use the theory and method of psychology to reveal the sources of the difficulties involved in recognising a once-seen person. Estimates of just how good a witness can be are drawn from laboratory studies using face photographs, from mock crime incidents, and from actual criminal cases, for reliability varies markedly in each of these three situations. Both an individual and a social perspective is taken of the eye-witnesses, and research into perception and memory, together with individual differences in such things as cognitive style, personality, suggestibility, age, sex, and ability to form both eidetic and memory images, are examined. The social aspects of stereotypes, the presence of other witnesses and the desire to be a 'good witness' are all discussed at length. Finally an extended examination of the possibility of voice parades and changes in identification procedures, together with man-machine interaction techniques, is undertaken.

Why did Newton struggle for thirty years to make gold by alchemy - and then become Master of the Mint? Why do we blush? Why do we have illusions? In this collection of essays, originally published in 1994, Richard Gregory once again delights and tantalizes with tales of his childhood, his family and friends, the famous and the infamous, and weaves them into a rich pattern to illuminate scientific principles and puzzles. If you can put the book down, each essay is complete on its own, but they are united by the magic of human perception. From seeing and hearing to feeling and believing, from the shape of traffic signs to knowledge of quantum mechanics, all our interactions with the outside world are mediated by perception. Our knowledge is further distilled by the machines which help our own biological mechanisms, like microscopes and telescopes, electric light, and even more powerfully by computer technology. But if the natural structures of perception can affect our interpretation of the world, how much more dramatically might science education and tools of information technology enhance - though sometimes mislead - our perception of reality? Even Odder Perceptions may not have all the answers, but it certainly poses more questions.

This volume outlines some of the developments in practical and theoretical research into speechreading lipreading that have taken place since the publication of the original "Hearing by Eye". It comprises 15 chapters by international researchers in psychology, psycholinguistics, experimental and clinical speech science, and computer engineering. It answers theoretical questions what are the mechanisms by which heard and seen speech combine? and practical ones what makes a good speechreader? Can machines be programmed to recognize seen and seen-and-heard speech?. The book is written in a non-technical way and starts to articulate a behaviourally-based but cross-disciplinary programme of research in understanding how natural language can be delivered by different modalities.

This is the first volume dedicated solely to the topic of epistemological disjunctivism. The original essays in this volume, written by leading and up-and-coming scholars on the topic, are divided into three thematic sections. The first set of chapters addresses the historical background of epistemological disjunctivism. It features essays on ancient epistemology, Immanuel Kant, J.L. Austin, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second section tackles a number contemporary issues related to epistemological disjunctivism, including its relationship with perceptual disjunctivism, radical skepticism, and reasons for belief. Finally, the third group of essays extends the framework of epistemological disjunctivism to other forms of knowledge, such as testimonial knowledge, knowledge of other minds, and self-knowledge. Epistemological Disjunctivism is a timely collection that engages with an increasingly important topic in philosophy. It will appeal to researches and graduate students working in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of perception.

The systematic scientific investigation of human perception began over 130 years ago, yet relatively little is known about how we identify complex patterns. A major reason for this is that historically, most perceptual research focused on the more basic processes involved in the detection and discrimination of simple stimuli. This work progressed in a connectionist fashion, attempting to clarify fundamental mechanisms in depth before addressing the more complex problems of pattern recognition and classification. This extensive and impressive research effort built a firm basis from which to speculate about these issues. What seemed lacking, however, was an overall characterization of the recognition problem - a broad theoretical structure to direct future research in this area. Consequently, our primary objective in this volume, originally published in 1981, was not only to review existing contributions to our understanding of classification and recognition, but to project fruitful areas and directions for future research as well. The book covers four areas: complex visual patterns; complex auditory patterns; multi-dimensional perceptual spaces; theoretical pattern recognition.

Originally published in 1983, the aim of this book was to discuss some fundamental problems of cognitive developmental psychology at the time. The theme which underlies the discussion is that scientific knowledge of the cognitive characteristics of other people starts from the cognitive instruments that we psychologist employ, viz. our theories, models, assumptions, methods of enquiry etc. Thus our scientific cognitive equipment not only provides the format in which cognition in other people is expressed, it also exemplifies, in some abstract sense, this cognition. The first part of the book deals with the concept of development in relation to the structure of developmental theories. It is argued that theories originate from (implicit) conceptual analyses of (implicit) final state definitions. Starting from this specific view on the nature of developmental theories, the second part of the book discusses perception and perceptual development.

Richard Gregory was one of the major scientific thinkers of our time. Originally published in 1986, here he presents essays on the rich subject of perception. How we experience colours, shapes, sounds, touches, tickles, tastes and smells is a mysterious and rich inquiry. Wonderful as these sensations are, though, he argues that perception becomes really interesting when we consider how objects are identified and located in space and time as things we interact with, using our intelligence to understand them. Gregory's essays convey the crucial importance of the major scientists and their achievements in the study of perception; but they also show us how much we can learn from our surroundings, our language, our times, our successes and our failures. Why are we so often fooled, in scientific as well as everyday life?

Originally published in 1978, this study examines the shortcomings of some theoretical approaches to psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms at the time. Keith Oatley illustrates the extent of these shortcomings by showing how inefficient brain researchers - using their present approaches - would be in trying to understand a computer, which is considerably simpler than the human brain. He concludes that we need better theories than those usually espoused in psychology, and goes on to expound a theory of cognitive representation and inference in perception, which began with Helmholtz more than a hundred years ago but which can now be given substance and formal structure in artificial intelligence programs. The author deploys this theory to give an account of some fundamental problems, such as how we see a three-dimensional world, and how the brain copes so well with incomplete sensory data and with damage to its own components.

Originally published in 1983, this book is about the way we see things - or think we do, which is by no means the same - and about the ways in which we have tried to reproduce that visual concept in diagrams, pictures, photographs, films and television. Whatever the medium, if any degree of realism is intended, some use of perspective is inevitable, and some understanding of it can aid the appreciation of the result. But here the technicalities of perspective geometry are treated as far as possible non-technically, by a common-sense approach. Students, would-be artists or architects, are warned in the Preface that they will travel second-class in the author's train of thought (the 'general reader' coming first), but they may well find the journey worthwhile in that it provides a background to a subsequent, more detailed studies. Lawrence Wright shows that every form of perspective representation has some innate falsity, but that most such forms offer an adequate makeshift; that rules of geometry often need to be bent; that labour-saving dodges and shortcuts exist. As he says, perspective drawing, like politics, is an art of the possible. In reading this book, beginners may find it all simpler than they had supposed, though the established expert may in some interesting respects find just the opposite. The general reader may thereafter find himself seeing things - and representations of them - in a new light.

This book - written in collaboration with Rene Doursat, director of the Complex Systems Institute, Paris - adds a new dimension to Cognitive Grammars. It provides a rigorous, operational mathematical foundation, which draws from topology, geometry and dynamical systems to model iconic "image-schemas" and "conceptual archetypes". It defends the thesis that Rene Thom's morphodynamics is especially well suited to the task and allows to transform the morphological structures of perception into Gestalt-like, abstract, proto-linguistic schemas that can act as inputs into higher-level specific linguistic routines. Cognitive Grammars have drawn upon the view that the deep syntactic and semantic structures of language, such as prepositions and case roles, are grounded in perception and action. This study raises difficult problems, which thus far have not been addressed as a mathematical challenge. Cognitive Morphodynamics shows how this gap can be filled.

Originally published in 1963, this is a classic work on the psychology of perception. By means of suitable patterns on a partly concealed rotating disc Michotte was able to give the impression of objects in movement; and where certain conditions of speed, position, and time-interval were satisfied, his subjects received the impression of a causal interaction between two objects - for example, the impression that one object has 'bumped into' another (the 'Launching Effect') or is carrying it along (the 'Entraining Effect'). In a further group of experiments Michotte studies the conditions in which moving objects look as though they are alive. A large number of experiments are described, and on the basis of them Michotte formulates a theory as to the conditions in which causal impressions occur. He also compares his own views on causality with those of Hume, Maine de Biran, and Piaget.

Originally published in 1977, this volume contains the most recent theoretical views and experimental findings by prominent psychologists at the time, working in areas they considered to be most basic to the reading processes. The material will still be of value to people interested in applied and basic aspects of reading, as well as those concerned with language processing and information processing in general. The volume divides conveniently into two areas, perception and comprehension. The initial chapters deal with the perceptual processes involved in reading. The second half of the volume delves into the area of comprehension. The interested reader will find a wide variety of topics covered in the volume that reflect the amazingly wide range of cognitive functions that are part of the reading process.

Originally published in 1957, the primary aim of this study was to shed light upon the logical character of the psychology of perception. D.W. Hamlyn begins by delimiting the field of psychological inquiry into perception, then gives a detailed account of the types of explanation appropriate in the field. He maintains that these explanations have certain important peculiarities which distinguish them from other scientific inquiries. In view of the central importance of Gestalt Theory in this field an account is given of its origins, and its main features are critically discussed. The work should still be of considerable interest to both philosophers and psychologists, as well as to all those interested in the relations between the two subjects.

Perception is about the reception, selection, acquisition, transformation and organization of sensory information. This book, originally published in 1976, discusses a number of aspects of human perception within a theoretical framework in which man is considered as a processor of information. The main emphasis is on visual perception with particular reference to looking and pattern recognition; selective listening and speech recognition are also discussed.

Originally published in 1982, this book introduces the student to the central problem of all perceptual theories: just how does the perceiver identify particular objects? In focusing on the problem, Dr Wilding provides a coherent, well organized framework for its study, bypassing the conventional split between perception and reaction time evidence which was common to most textbooks at the time. The author draws on evidence from a wider number of research traditions and argues that each has a contribution to make to any account of perception. Throughout he emphasizes the methodological basis of the research discussed, in order to provide students with a solid foundation for their own practical work.