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 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 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.

Based on a conference held in honor of Professor Tarow Indow, this volume is organized into three major topics concerning the use of geometry in perception: * space -- referring to attempts to represent the subjective space within which we locate ourselves and perceive objects to reside; * color -- dealing with attempts to represent the structure of color percepts as revealed by various experimental procedures; and * scaling -- focusing on the organization of various bodies of data -- in this case perceptual -- through scaling techniques, primarily multidimensional ones. These topics provide a natural organization of the work in the field, as well as one that corresponds to the major aspects of Indow's contributions. This book's goal is to provide the reader with an overview of the issues in each of the areas, and to present current results from the laboratories of leading researchers in these areas.

The work of Richard M. Shiffrin has highly impacted the field of cognitive science, and current developments within perception and memory have been influenced by his ideas. In this volume, several key figures in the field will comment on these developments and put them in a wider perspective. Although many theories and models have been presented in recent years for various aspects of human cognition, there have not been many comparative evaluations that focus on how these models have really advanced our understanding of the underlying mechanisms. This volume will be a valuable source of information for both cognitive scientists working in the field, and researchers and students looking for a clear, accessible presentation of the key problems in cognitive science. Highlighted sections include attention and perception, memory functions and processes, knowledge representation and semantics, modelling approaches and applications.

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 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.

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.

Since 1991, the edited book series Studies in Perception and Action has appeared in conjunction with the biennial International Conference of Perception and Action (ICPA), a conference that provides an opportunity for individuals who share interests in ecological psychology to come together to present current research, exchange ideas, and engage in conversation on theoretical and methodological concerns. The Studies in Perception and Action series is a way to preserve the dialogues between conference attendees and researchers displaying their latest work. This volume, the eighth in the series, presents the conversations held at the 13th ICPA meeting in the summer of 2005. Studies in Perception and Action VIII includes broad coverage of the most current advances in research on perceiving and acting, including contributions from researchers in Australia, China, Japan, Europe, and North America. It addresses cutting-edge research in dynamics and human movement, recent progress in ecological approaches to perceiving and acting, and substantially extends our knowledge of just how rich a source of information the world is across a wide range of modalities. This volume will appeal to individuals who follow the research literature in ecological psychology, as well as those interested in perception, perceptual development, human movement dynamics, and social processes.

Over the past decade, the integration of psychology and fine art has sparked growing academic interest among researchers of these disciplines. The author, both a psychologist and artist, offers up a unique merger and perspective of these fields. Through the production of fine art, which is directly informed by neuroscientific and optical processes, this volume aims to fill a gap in the literature and understanding of the creation and perception of the grid image created as a work of art. The grid image is employed (for reasons discussed in the text) to illustrate more general processes associated with the integration of vision, visual distortion, and painting. Existing at the intersection of perceptual neuroscience, psychology, fine art and art history, this volume concerns the act of painting and the process of looking. More specifically, the book examines vision and the effects of visual impairment and how these can be interpreted through painting within a theoretical framework of visual neuroscience.

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.

In the late-1980s, visual cognition was a small subfield of cognitive psychology, and the standard texts mainly discussed just iconic memory in their sections on visual cognition. In the subsequent two decades, and especially very recently, many remarkable new aspects of the processing of brief visual stimuli have been discovered -- change blindness, repetition blindness, the attentional blink, newly-discovered properties of visual short-term memory and of the face recognition system, the influence of reentrant processing on visual perception, and the surprisingly intimate relationships between eyeblinks and visual cognition. This volume provides up-to-date tutorial reviews of these many new developments in the study of visual cognition written by the leaders in the discipline, providing an incisive and comprehensive survey of research in this dynamic field.

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.

Originally published in 1981, this third volume deals with the empirical data base and the theories concerning visual perception - the set of mental responses to photic stimulation of the eyes. As the book develops, the plan was to present a general taxonomy of visual processes and phenomena. It was hoped that such a general perspective would help to bring some order to the extensive, but largely unorganized, research literature dealing with our immediate perceptual responses to visual stimuli at the time. The specific goal of this work was to provide a classification system that integrates and systematizes the data base of perceptual psychology into a comprehensive intellectual scheme by means of an eclectic, multi-level metatheory invoking several different kinds of explanation.

Originally published in 1988 Applied Cognitive Psychology draws on the psychology of perception, attention, and cognition to give an understanding of some everyday activities and skills. Paul Barber focuses on processes involved in selecting simple actions, face perception, reading, and tasks requiring attention skills. He uses practical problems as starting points for discussion, including mental overloading in air-traffic controllers, cooker-hob design, the use of Photokit/identikit, and reading from computer screens. The book also examines the strengths and limitations of the basic analytical approach of 'information-processing' in psychology. As well as providing a textbook for students of psychology and ergonomics, Applied Cognitive Psychology will still be welcomed by those from other disciplines - management studies, education, sports science - who need to understand skilled behaviour in applied settings.

Originally published in 1979, this book contains papers presented at a conference held in 1977 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the University of Uppsala. Beyond the commemoration, the main reason for this conference was to get students of memory together to discuss and evaluate the memory research that had already been carried out, was presently underway and to speculate about the type of research in this area that would be carried out in the future. The contributors were specifically asked to concentrate on overall theoretical and metatheoretical questions at the cost of empirical problems. With chapters from many of the leading experts in the field this is an opportunity to enjoy some of their early insights.

Originally published in 1988, this is the final volume in the set. The original intent of the tetralogy was to review neural explanations of high level perceptual and cognitive processes. However, at this point, it became clear that there were few neural explanations of perceptual topics - a situation that still persists today. This book, therefore, used a different framework examining the role of detection, discrimination, and recognition at the behavioral level.

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

We are directed to "mind the time" on occasions when diligence to the clock is important. However, to deliberately invoke "mind your time" is to remember how quickly time, and the clock which serves as its agent, can so quickly recede into the mundane and taken for granted parts of our lives. The experience of time in families can both permeate all activities but nevertheless be hidden. The papers in this volume, representing a range of disciplines (history, sociology, psychology, family therapy, leisure studies, family science) intentionally foreground the way that time shapes everyday family worlds. Each chapter offers different insights into the way that we conceptualize time including analyses of pace, rhythm, negotiation, politics, timetables, schedules, social interaction and support. The meaning of time is illustrated through analyses of a variety of family issues including father involvement, infertility, work and family, mothering and care work, housework, family time, single parent families, family life education and gender.

Psychology has an important part to play in the teaching and practice of physical education and sport, and this volume, originally published in 1972, provided a systematic and authoritative introduction to the major areas in this field at the time. The contributors, leading experts in the UK and US, cover five major areas of psychology: perception, learning, personality, motivation and emotion, focusing attention on important current research of the time, and opening up these areas for the serious student. They review controversial issues of central importance in physical education and sport, pointing to practical implications for learning, teaching and coaching. A great opportunity to read an early take on what has become a central part of physical education and sport today.

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.

Beginning with his doctoral dissertation in 1950 which introduced the study of event perception and the application of vector analysis to perception, Gunnar Johansson has been a seminal figure in the field of perception. His work on biomechanical motion in the 1970s challenged conventional notions and stimulated great interest among experimental psychologists and students of machine vision. In 1989 Johansson published his latest theoretical synthesis, the optic sphere theory, an innovative conceptualization that goes beyond his earlier proposals. This volume presents -- for the first time -- an extensive precis of the out-of-print classic 1950 monograph prepared by Johansson. It also includes a representative set of Johansson's important publications produced over the ensuing four decades. These papers served as the springboard for a set of original essays by a distinguished group of North American and European scientists. Part critical commentary, part elaboration, and part seeking new directions, the entire collection makes for a singularly rich treatment of the perception of objects and events.

Music is often defined as art for the ear, as the language of feeling, of the heart, as sound play, or as the science of composition. But music also conveys intellectual and emotional experiences, literary, religious, philosophical, social and political ideas. Countless composers encrypt contents in their music that can be deciphered by a variety of methods. This book is designed as an introduction to the basic questions of musical semantics and discusses Beethoven's committed art, the core ideas of the "Ring of the Nibelung" and of the "Symphony of a Thousand", Wagner's idea of a religion of art, the relation of music and poetry, the musico-literary conceptions of composers, the large field of program music and the history of the impact of Gustav Mahler.

First published in 2002. Written in 1959, this volume looks at the philosophical problems of perception, that arise mainly because our traditional common-sense notions clash with the factual evidence concerning not only the occurrence of illusions and hallucinations but also the essential role played by complex causal and psychological processes in perceiving.

In this expanded and thoroughly updated second edition, Michael A. Harvey elaborates his pioneering biopsychosocial model of the effective assessment and treatment of deaf and hard-of-hearing clients in individual and family therapy. Taking a broad ecological perspective, he examines the influences of larger networks on the individual and vice versa, and illuminates the overt and covert conflicts among family members, school and vocational rehabilitation personnel, and friends that often exacerbate problems. The spiritual issues relevant to those who have experienced any kind of loss receive special attention in the new edition, as do the daily hurtful exchanges in the lives of the deaf he sums up as "ordinary evil." Throughout the reader-friendly text, theoretical description is balanced with practical advice; points are vividly illustrated with extended verbatim transcripts from actual therapy sessions and with exchanges in the author's question-and-answer column in the journal, Hearing Loss: Self-Help for the Hard of Hearing. Psychotherapy With Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Persons, Second Edition, is essential reading for all mental health professionals who see even occasional clients whose lives have been affected by hearing loss in themselves or in family members.