Contrary Imaginations was an original and suggestive study of two types of intelligent schoolboy - the converger with his preference for science and the diverger with his leaning towards the arts. In Frames of Mind, originally published in 1968, Liam Hudson extends and enriches this classification and begins to detect the existence of two subcultures. Within these it is not merely a question of leanings towards science or the arts as a vocation: respect for authority, masculine and feminine tendencies, qualities of perception, and the prevalent myths about various callings are all involved. The result is a very human and well-grounded investigation of the profound forces (whether of social origin or based within their own personalities) which, in varying ways, influence young people in choosing a career.

Originally published in 1987, this book, attempted to bring together work by researchers concerned with the functional and neurological mechanisms underlying visual object processing, and the ways in which such mechanisms can be neurologically impaired. The editors termed it a 'Cognitive Neuropsychological' approach, because they believed it tried to relate evidence from neurological impairments of visual object processing to models of normal performance in a new and important way. Two broad aims are apparent. One is to test models of normal performance by evaluating how well the models account for the patterns of impairment and preservation of abilities that can occur following brain damage. The other is to use models of normal performance to further their understanding of acquired disorders of visual object processing. These aims distinguish the approach from neuropsychological work whose primary aim is to relate acquired deficits to the sites of damage, and from work in the field of cognitive psychology which attempts only to develop models of normal performance.

In the late 1970s, reading research had become a true interdisciplinary endeavour with flavours of anthropology, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, educational psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and instructional technology. Given appropriate integration, results from these diverse perspectives can enhance our understanding of reading behaviour tremendously, both in its acquisition and in its skilled functioning. Thus, the enthusiasm for such interdisciplinary interaction had been quite intense for some time. In the years before publication, the National Reading Conference had been doing everything possible to accelerate this interaction. Originally published in 1981, the chapters in this book are the fruits of that effort. The research focuses on specifying skills in identifying alphabetical elements and the rules that govern their combination, on constructing models that characterize the recognition of individual words and the interpretation of texts, and on discovering what factors are responsible for blocking the normal acquisition process in many children. Chapters 2 to 12 of this book reflect these changing foci. They are nevertheless sandwiched by two chapters that deal with the historical background and future outlook of reading instruction.

'How do children see the world?' is a question of immense importance which fascinates not only psychologists but also parents and all those concerned with education. In this English translation, first published in 1976, the author, who was Professor of Psychology at the Rene Descartes University in Paris, provided the most comprehensive review at the time of the development of visual perception in children, a field to which she herself had made a substantial contribution. Her book, which gave the first comprehensive study of the relationship between cognitive development and perceptual activities in small children, explores how they interpret visual information and gradually build up a picture of the world. The author had devoted fifteen years to research on the visual world of the child and possessed an exhaustive knowledge of the experimental literature on the subject in English, French, Russian and other languages. She saw perception as a form of knowledge which the child exploits and adapts in a variety of ways at different stages of development. This is brilliantly demonstrated in her own research on the strategies children use in judging things as 'different' or 'the same' and the way these relate to the structure of their perceptual organisation. This book is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in developmental and cognitive psychology; it also provides an object lesson in the application of experimental methods. In addition the organisation of the material made it a valuable textbook for advanced undergraduate and post-graduate teaching and will still be of interest in its historical context today.

Originally published in 1989, this sourcebook for anatomic studies in the neuropsychology of visual perception contains chapters on disorders of visual agnosias, impaired object perception and spatial neglect, and abnormal visual imagery. The neurological basis of visual perception and the disorders that result from brain damage are discussed. At the time the chapters in this volume constituted a state of the art survey in this area and provided data that were essential for the development of models of normal image and object formation.

In the 10 years prior to publication the quantity of research on eye movements as they pertain to psychological processes had been increasing at a rapid rate. Originally published in 1976, the editors' purpose was to bring together investigators representing different theoretical positions and methodological approaches to present their recent findings, to debate the theoretical points of view, and to identify and discuss the major research problems on eye movements at the time. An attempt was made to invite participants ranging all the way from promising graduate students through the established authorities in the field. The result was an intensive three-day session with meetings from early morning until late into the evening with much opportunity for formal and informal group discussion. The edited papers and transcripts of the discussions are the contents of this book.

Originally published in 1981, this volume represents the edited proceedings of the third symposium on eye movements and behaviour sponsored by the US Army Human Engineering Laboratory. The conference, titled "The Last Whole Earth Eye Movement Conference" was held in Florida in February 1980. As the conference approached, seizure of the American hostages by the Iranian militants, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the uncertain economic outlook around the world made it appear as though the title was a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the meeting proved highly successful and people throughout the world seemed to be adapting to the stresses of international tension, making the possibility of subsequent meetings more likely. The present volume is intended to serve as a complementary text to the earlier texts Eye Movements and Psychological Processes (Monty & Senders, 1976) and Eye Movements and the Higher Psychological Functions (Senders, Fisher & Monty, 1978), rather than a revision and update of them.

Originally published in 1978, this volume reflects the proceedings of a conference held in February 1977 in California and is a natural successor to the earlier volume Eye Movements and Psychological Processes (Monty & Senders, 1976). The second conference was aimed at providing a greater opportunity for discussing the "higher mental processes" touched on in the first volume. Part 1 is devoted to an intensive review of the underlying processes and psychological functions of eye movements. It includes discussions of the relationships of cortical and subcortical visual areas to eye movements and visual processing associated with them; information about the position of the eye in the head and the perception of visual space; saccades and visual functioning; and masking. In further parts it goes on to look at: methodology and models; cognitive processes; reading processes; looking at static and dynamic display; and finally chapters on problems and applications.

The early years of modern experimental psychology were marked by a considerable amount of research on attention, and much work was carried out in the laboratories of Wundt, Titchener and Helmholtz. For various reasons, research on attention declined from 1920 until the 1950s. Under the early philosophy of behaviourism, attention became suspect as a 'mentalistic' concept. At the time of original publication in 1969, however, much work had been done to quantify and make objective research in this area. This was of increasing importance in a world dominated by communication networks, and 'man-machine' systems, in which the human element is the weakest link due to the limits on the rate at which man can handle information. Following the publication of Broadbent's Perception and Communication in 1958, work on attention had begun to pour from an ever increasing number of laboratories. This book is dedicated to summarising what we knew, and attempts to survey the behavioural research in vision and hearing which throw light on how we share and direct attention, what are the limits of attention, to make some general methodological recommendations, to review current theories of the time, and to provide a guide to the relevant physiological work. As far as possible, work on memory has been omitted. A bibliography of the major work to the spring of 1969 is included.

Originally published in 1987, this title intended to historically reveal, through tracing Gibson's development, the substance of his views and how they bore upon general philosophical issues in theories of knowledge, and to investigate in detail the historical context of Gibson's theoretical position within psychology. Though the author has included a history of Gibson's perceptual research and experimentation, the focus is to explicate the 'dynamic abstract form' of Gibson's ecological approach. His emphasis is philosophical and theoretical, attempting to bring out the direction Gibson was moving in and how such changes could restructure the theoretical fabric of psychology. He devotes considerable attention to the Greeks, Medievalists, and the founders of the Scientific Revolution. This is because Gibson's theoretical challenge runs deep into the structure of western thought. The authors' central goal was to set Gibson's ecological theory within the historical context of fundamental philosophical-scientific issues.

Originally published in 1981, Workshops in Perception is designed to enable students to devise their own experiments in sensory processes or perception. The thirty workshops include over a hundred different possible student projects covering the full range of the senses and interactions among them. The topics range from simple perimetry to the perception of language and social situations. In addition to more traditional topics such as illusions, adaptation and after-effects, they include lifespan perceptual development, musical illusions, and even a consumer-oriented study of road atlases. Each of the ten major sections has a general introduction to the topic with suggestions for reading. Each workshop has a more specific introduction to its topic, and an experiment outlined. A typical outline will suggest more independent variables than a student can handle, and it is up to the student to select the variables he considers important and to choose the appropriate levels of the variables. Although many suggestions are made regarding the actual running of each workshop, deciding precisely how to carry out the experiment is left up to the student. Pilot work and consultation with the tutor is encouraged. Suggestions for the form of the analysis are made, but again the details are left to the student. Several alternatives to the main workshop are outlined briefly, and these are suited to the more adventurous or advanced student. Thus the book is suited to students with a wide range of ability.

Originally published in 1981, perceptual organization had been synonymous with Gestalt psychology, and Gestalt psychology had fallen into disrepute. In the heyday of Behaviorism, the few cognitive psychologists of the time pursued Gestalt phenomena. But in 1981, Cognitive Psychology was married to Information Processing. (Some would say that it was a marriage of convenience.) After the wedding, Cognitive Psychology had come to look like a theoretically wrinkled Behaviorism; very few of the mainstream topics of Cognitive Psychology made explicit contact with Gestalt phenomena. In the background, Cognition's first love - Gestalt - was pining to regain favor. The cognitive psychologists' desire for a phenomenological and intellectual interaction with Gestalt psychology did not manifest itself in their publications, but it did surface often enough at the Psychonomic Society meeting in 1976 for them to remark upon it in one of their conversations. This book, then, is the product of the editors' curiosity about the status of ideas at the time, first proposed by Gestalt psychologists. For two days in November 1977, they held an exhilarating symposium that was attended by some 20 people, not all of whom are represented in this volume. At the end of our symposium it was agreed that they would try, in contributions to this volume, to convey the speculative and metatheoretical ground of their research in addition to the solid data and carefully wrought theories that are the figure of their research.

Each of us is able to recognise the faces of many hundreds if not thousands of people known to us. We recognise faces despite seeing them in different views and with changing expressions. From these varying patterns we somehow extract the invariant characteristics of an individual's face, and usually remember why a face seems familiar, recalling where we know the person from and what they are called. In this book, originally published in 1988, the author describes the progress which has been made by psychologists towards understanding these perceptual and cognitive processes, and points to theoretical directions which may prove important in the future. Though emphasising theory, the book also addresses practical problems of eyewitness testimony, and discusses the relationship between recognising faces, and other aspects of face processing such as perceiving expressions and lipreading. The book was aimed primarily at a research audience, but would also interest advanced undergraduate students in vision and cognition.

The term 'visual perception' covers a very wide range of psychological functions. This title, originally published in 1970, which provides a broad survey of this vast field of knowledge, would have proved a valuable general account for students taking degree courses in psychology at the time. Professor Vernon examines a large number of experiments carried out over the previous twenty years, their findings, the conclusions drawn from them, and - equally important - the still unanswered questions which some of them raised. As the title suggests, Professor Vernon considers that - while much knowledge of the simpler perceptual processes had been gained in laboratory experiments - perhaps too little investigation had been undertaken into the more complex processes which normally determine understanding of and response to environment: the processes of identification and classification that depend to a considerable extent on learning, memory, attention, reasoning and language. An extensive bibliography is provided.

Originally published in 1977, the chapters in this volume derive from a conference on Perceiving, Acting and Knowing held by the Center for Research in Human Learning at the University of Minnesota in 1973. The volume was intended to appeal, not just to the specialist or the novice, but to anyone sufficiently interested in psychology to have obtained a sense of its history at the time. Through these essays the authors express a collective attitude that a careful scrutiny of the fundamental tenets of contemporary psychology may be needed. In some essays specific faults in the foundations of an area are discussed, and suggestions are made for remedying them. In other essays the authors flirt with more radical solutions, namely, beginning from new foundations altogether. Although the authors do not present a monolithic viewpoint, a careful reading of all their essays under one cover reveals a glimpse of a new framework by which theory and research may be guided.

This book combines insights from the humanities and modern neuroscience to explore the contribution of affect and embodiment on meaning-making in case studies from animation, video games, and virtual worlds. As we interact more and more with animated characters and avatars in everyday media consumption, it has become vital to investigate the ways that animated environments influence our perception of the liberal humanist subject. This book is the first to apply recent research on the application of the embodied mind thesis to our understanding of embodied engagement with nonhumans and cyborgs in animated media, analyzing works by Emile Cohl, Hayao Miyazaki, Tim Burton, Norman McLaren, the Quay Brothers, Pixar, and many others. Drawing on the breakthroughs of modern brain science to argue that animated media broadens the viewer's perceptual reach, this title offers a welcome contribution to the growing literature at the intersection of cognitive studies and film studies, with a perspective on animation that is new and original. 'Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation' will be essential reading for researchers of Animation Studies, Film and Media Theory, Posthumanism, Video Games, and Digital Culture, and will provide a key insight into animation for both undergraduate and graduate students. Because of the increasing importance of visual effect cinema and video games, the book will also be of keen interest within Film Studies and Media Studies, as well as to general readers interested in scholarship in animated media.

Originally published in 1974: 'This book sets forth a theory of cognitive development based on simple but powerful processes of inference. The theory is applied with great ingenuity and freshness to complex phenomena found during intellectual development. Dr Bryant has written an important and original book.' (J.S. Bruner) 'In this elegant, timely and brief volume, Dr Bryant produces strong experimental evidence which not only challenges Piaget's ideas, but even more importantly synthesizes the old and new findings into a newer theory of perceptual development. The importance of this book lies both in its demonstration of elegant experimental techniques in working with young children, and in the optimism it will eventually bring to all concerned with their education. Realizing that children can make deductive inferences at an early age, educators will have to rethink some of their approaches to the teaching of young children. The studies related to the understanding of number have crucial implications for the future teaching of mathematics. This book will cause many people to take fresh thoughts on the subjects here dealt with, and so it can be strongly recommended for all students of child development.' (William Yule, British Journal of Psychiatry)

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.

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.

A recent study indicates that 20 million people in the United States have significant sensorineural hearing loss. Approximately 95% of those people have partial losses, with varying degrees of residual hearing. These percentages are similar in other developed countries. What changes in the function of the cochlea or inner ear cause such losses? What does the world sound like to the 19 million people with residual hearing? How should we transform sounds to correct for the hearing loss and maximize restoration of normal hearing? Answers to such questions require detailed models of the way that sounds are processed by the nervous system, both for listeners with normal hearing and for those with sensorineural hearing loss. This book contains chapters describing the work of 25 different research groups. A great deal of research in recent years has been aimed at obtaining a better physiological description of the altered processes that cause sensorineural hearing loss and a better understanding of transformations that occur in the perception of those sounds that are sufficiently intense that they can still be heard. Efforts to understand these changes in function have lead to a better understanding of normal function as well. This research has been based on rigorous mathematical models, computer simulations of mechanical and physiological processes, and signal processing simulations of the altered perceptual experience of listeners with sensorineural hearing loss. This book provides examples of all these approaches to modeling sensorineural hearing loss and a summary of the latest research in the field.

The remarkable complexity and sophistication of our perceptual systems have evolved for ultimately one purpose - to promote efficient and effective action within a constantly changing environment. Traditionally, the route from perception to action has often been viewed as a single, one-directional sequence of stages, which begins with a stimulus presentation and ends with a response. This view has tended to emphasize the separation of perception from action, with the result that studies of stimulus and response processing have often been carried out in isolation from each other. The work in this issue takes a different approach, which reflects renewed and increasing interest in how cognitive systems for vision and action are integrated. The studies here explore multiple pathways between vision and action, the ways in which vision promotes action, and even the conditions and degree to which action and its consequences can influence vision. A variety of methods and theoretical approaches are represented, in studies examining spatial coding, object processing, motor behaviour, attentional bias, and codes for action.

The Comprehension of Jokes consolidates and develops the tradition of analysing jokes, by defining a framework of concepts which are suited to capturing what happens when someone understands a joke. The collection of concepts presented improves upon past work on joke analysis, outlining a simple model of text comprehension which supports all the assumptions necessary for a model of joke-understanding. This proposed framework encompasses and integrates a relatively wide range of disparate factors, including incongruity, superiority, and impropriety. Written by an expert in the field of humour, it provides a conceptual basis which will help to map out the landscape of joke comprehension. The book draws on past suggestions in many areas, primarily philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Current theories of how people understand non-humorous texts offer some important ideas, such as the need for representations of differing beliefs about the world, or the way that predictions may occur during the understanding of a text. The framework improves the clarity and coherence of some existing theoretical proposals and combines these ideas into a well-defined way of describing how a person understands a newly-encountered joke. All this is illustrated using typical textual jokes, some analysed in considerable detail. The book enables hypotheses about why jokes are funny to be stated more precisely and compared more easily, and should contribute to the development of a fuller cognitive model of joke comprehension. The Comprehension of Jokes will be of great interest to academics and postgraduate students in humour research, as well as those in disciplines like linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science who wish to explore the field of jokes and humour.

This book uncovers how we make meaning of abstraction, both historically and in present times, and examines abstract images as a visual language. The contributors demonstrate that abstraction is not primarily an artistic phenomenon, but rather arises from human beings' desire to imagine, understand and communicate complex, ineffable concepts in fields ranging from fine art and philosophy to technologies of data visualization, from cartography and medicine to astronomy. The book will be of interest to scholars working in image studies, visual studies, art history, philosophy and aesthetics.

This book discusses human perception and performance within the framework of the theory of self-organizing systems. To that end, it presents a variety of phenomena and experimental findings in the research field, and provides an introduction to the theory of self-organization, with a focus on amplitude equations, order parameter and Lotka-Volterra equations. The book demonstrates that relating the experimental findings to the mathematical models provides an explicit account for the causal nature of human perception and performance. In particular, the notion of determinism versus free will is discussed in this context. The book is divided into four main parts, the first of which discusses the relationship between the concept of determinism and the fundamental laws of physics. The second part provides an introduction to using the self-organization approach from physics to understand human perception and performance, a strategy used throughout the remainder of the book to connect experimental findings and mathematical models. In turn, the third part of the book focuses on investigating performance guided by perception: climbing stairs and grasping tools are presented in detail. Perceptually relevant bifurcation parameters in the mathematical models are also identified, e.g. in the context of walk-to-run gait transitions. Chains of perceptions and actions together with their underlying mechanisms are then presented, and a number of experimental phenomena - such as selective attention, priming, child play, bistable perception, retrieval-induced forgetting, functional fixedness and memory effects exhibiting hysteresis with positive or negative sign - are discussed. Human judgment making, internal experiences such as dreaming and thinking, and Freud's concept of consciousness are also addressed. The fourth and last part of the book explores several specific topics such as learning, social interactions between two people, life trajectories, and applications in clinical psychology. In particular, episodes of mania and depression under bipolar disorder, perception under schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive rituals are discussed. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in psychology, physics, applied mathematics, kinesiology, and the sport sciences who want to learn about the foundations of the field. Written for a mixed audience, the experiments and concepts are presented using non-technical language throughout. In addition, each chapter includes more advanced sections for modelers in the fields of physics and applied mathematics.

Features first hand accounts of the development of Ecological Psychology. Reflects on how the field has changed since the original interviews. Provides an interdisciplinary overview of Ecological Psychology and will appeal to researchers of this field, as well as those studying the History of Psychology and Cognitive Science more broadly.