Looking at the ways humans perceive, interpret, remember, and interact with events occurring in space, this book focuses on two aspects of spatial cognition: How does spatial cognition develop? What is the relation between spatial cognition and the brain? This book offers a unique opportunity to share the combined efforts of scientists from varied disciplines, including cognitive and developmental psychology, neuropsychology, behavioral neurology, and neurobiology in the process of interacting and exchanging ideas. Based on a conference held at the Neuroscience Conference Center of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, this book explores current scientific trends seeking a biological basis for understanding the relationships among brain, mind, and behavior.

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.

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 is the fourteenth in the Studies in Perception and Action book series, and highlights research presented at the 19th International Conference of Perception and Action (ICPA) in the summer of 2017. Since 1991, this edited book series has appeared in conjunction with the biennial ICPA meeting. 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.

Why do we consider incest wrong, even when it occurs between consenting adults unable to have children? Why are words that gross us out more likely to be deemed "obscene" and denied the protection of the First Amendment? In a world where a gruesome photograph can decisively influence a jury and homosexual behavior is still condemned by some as "unnatural," it is worth asking: is our legal system really governed by the power of reason? Or do we allow a primitive human emotion, disgust, to guide us in our lawmaking? In Objection, psychologists Debra Lieberman and Carlton Patrick examine disgust and its impact on the legal system to show why the things that we find stomach-turning so often become the things that we render unlawful. Shedding light on the evolutionary and psychological origins of disgust, the authors reveal how ancient human intuitions about what is safe to eat or touch, or who would make an advantageous mate, have become co-opted by moral systems designed to condemn behavior and identify groups of people ripe for marginalization. Over time these moral stances have made their way into legal codes, and disgust has thereby served as the impetus for laws against behaviors almost universally held to be "disgusting" (corpse desecration, bestiality) - and as the implicit justification for more controversial prohibitions (homosexuality, use of pornography). Written with a critical eye on current events, Lieberman and Patrick build a case for a more reasoned approach to lawmaking in a system that often confuses "gross" with "wrong."

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.

The general aim of this volume is to investigate the nature of the relation between pictorial experience and aesthetic appreciation. In particular, it is concerned with the character and intimacy of this relationship: is there a mere causal connection between pictorial experience and aesthetic appreciation, or are the two relata constitutively associated with one another? The essays in the book's first section investigate important conceptual issues related to the pictorial experience of paintings. In Section II, the essays discuss the notion of styles, techniques, agency, and facture, and also take into account the experience of photographic and cinematic pictures. The Pleasure of Pictures goes substantially beyond current debates in the philosophy of depiction to launch a new area of reflection in philosophical aesthetics.

In writing The Psychology of Politics, Hans Eysenck had two aims in mind: to write a book about modern developments in the field of attitude studies which would be intelligible to the layman; and one that would integrate into one consistent theoretical system a large number of contributions on the topic from different fields. Eysenck believes that science has something to say about such problems as anti-Semitism, the origin and growth of fascist and communist ideologies, the causal determinants of voting behavior, the structure of opinions and attitudes, and the relationship between politics and personality. He seeks to rescue these factual findings from the obscurity of technical journals and present them in a more accessible form.

The research presented in this book outlines the main principles of organization and structure in the field of attitudes. These principles account in a remarkably complete and detailed manner for the systems of political organization found in Great Britain, that is, the Conservative, Liberal, and Socialist parties, and the communist and fascist groups. Next, Eysenck relates these principles to the system of personality structure which for many years formed the main focus of research activity at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.

The Psychology of Politics integrates attitude research with modern learning theory. In his new introduction, Eysenck writes that his research and personal experiences in Germany led him to believe that authoritarianism could appear equally well on the left as on the right. He saw Stalin as equally authoritarian as Hitler, and communism as equally totalitarian as Nazism. The Psychology of Politics contains the evidence and arguments Eysenck used to demonstrate his approach. This volume is of enduring significance for psychologists, political theorists, and historians. It is by indirection a major statement in modern liberalism.

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.

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.

Synthesizing a range of studies on morphological processing from the past 30 years, this edited collection presents the current state of knowledge on morphological processing and defines classroom practices to help students conceptualise the role of morphology in reading, spelling, and vocabulary development. Research has increasingly indicated the importance of morphological tasks in relation to reading, spelling, and vocabulary acquisition in the classroom. Chapter authors present the theoretical considerations guiding morphological processing research to date, address the use of morphology with reference to different populations of learners, and propose effective and innovative instructional strategies for integrating morphology in the classroom.

Originally published in 1974, this introductory text has been designed specifically for teachers in training, and it presents the basic psychological principles governing learning, perception, motivation and the retention of knowledge at the time. The text is carefully tailored for would-be teachers in its clear and informal style, and in its selective aspects of psychology which the teacher can use to advantage in his efforts to assist the child. The book has an eclectic approach to psychological theory, drawing upon the insights of behaviourism, perceptualism and the Gestalt school, as well as the developmental theories of Jean Piaget. The author discusses in some detail theories concerning the nature of intelligence, and the relationship between creativity and intelligence; and he investigates the dynamics of social adjustment, introducing the part that may be played by meditation in helping to solve some of the problems of emotional stress within the learning situation. In his consideration of the management of learning, the author lays much emphasis upon the importance of individual cognitive styles, individualizing instruction and independent learning. In one chapter Dr Mueller is concerned with factors in the measurement of personality and of performance in the classroom, and he reflects upon the specific problem of objectivity in such assessment. Finally, some consideration is given to the problems and characteristics of the socially disadvantaged child and to the role of the teacher in helping to solve some of the learning problems of these children.

The founder of both American pragmatism and semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is widely regarded as an enormously important and pioneering theorist. In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and significance of Peirce's work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce's theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and, in so doing, forge a new path for understanding the centrality of visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to Peirce's theories, including the perception of generality; the legacy of ideas being copies of impressions; imagination and its contribution to knowledge; logical graphs, diagrams, and the question of whether their iconicity distinguishes them from other sorts of symbolic notation; how images and diagrams contribute to scientific discovery and make it possible to perceive formal relations; and the importance and danger of using diagrams to convey scientific ideas. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice's philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

'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 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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.