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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Cognition & cognitive psychology > Perception
How do you feel when you bite into a pear wear a feather boa stand in a noisy auditorium or look for a friend in a crowd? It's likely that one of these situations would be pleasant for you, and perhaps one would be unpleasant. Some people will adore the grainy texture of a pear, while others will shudder at the idea of this texture in their mouths. Touching a feather boa will be fun and luxurious to some, and others will bristle at the idea of all those feathers brushing on the skin. Noisy, busy environments will energize some people, and will overwhelm others. These different reactions reflect people's individual sensory patterns, which in turn affect the way we react to everything that happens to us throughout the day. Living Sensationally identifies four major sensory types: Seekers, Bystanders, Avoiders and Sensors. The author helps readers to find their own patterns and the patterns of those around them, and then offers suggestions for harnessing this knowledge to make their lives more in synch with their sensations. Living Sensationally provides practical sensory ideas for individuals, families and businesses. Armed with the information in Living Sensationally, people will be able to pick just the right kind of clothing, job and home and know why they are making such choices.
This book provides a state-of-the-art discussion forum for topics that are of high interest in the field of visual perception research. Experts from different countries and different scientific disciplines, such as medicine, psychology, neuroscience, sport and movement science, provide a number of significant contributions, covering recent theoretical developments, innovative methodical developments, current research evidence, as well as implications for practical applications in the field of visual perception. Topics discussed in the book include the role of importance in visual perception, accuracy and bias in emotion perception, automated vector-based gaze analysis, visual-vestibular interactions when performing complex skills, variability of fixation durations in healthy participants, gaze behaviour in subjects with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, perception of moving objects in real life, controlling posture in differing perceptual information situations, orientation matching in perceptual space, error correction on the basis of visual information in sports, visual perceptual learning in cytopathology, visuomotor behaviour in virtual reality situations, role of augmented visual feedback in motor learning, informational domains in integrating information from different sensory sources, and the role of visual inputs in sensorimotor integration. Given the wide range of topics and scientific disciplines, this book may be an important source of information for graduate students, researchers and practitioners that study and work in the field of visual perception.
Mark Eli Kalderon presents an original study in the philosophy of perception written in the medium of historiography. He considers the phenomenology and metaphysics of sensory presentation through the examination of an ancient aporia. Specifically, he argues that a puzzle about perception at a distance is behind Empedocles' theory of vision. Empedocles conceives of perception as a mode of material assimilation, but this raises a puzzle about color vision, since color vision seems to present colors that inhere in distant objects. But if the colors inhere in distant objects how can they be taken in by the organ of sight and so be palpable to sense? Aristotle purports to resolve this puzzle in his definition of perception as the assimilation of sensible form without the matter of the perceived particular. Aristotle explicitly criticizes Empedocles, though he is keen to retain the idea that perception is a mode of assimilation, if not a material mode. Aristotle's notorious definition has long puzzled commentators. Kalderon shows how, read in light of Empedoclean puzzlement about the sensory presentation of remote objects, Aristotle's definition of perception can be better understood. Moreover, when so read, the resulting conception of perception is both attractive and defensible.
Beliefs and expectancies influence our everyday thoughts, feelings, and actions. These attributes make a closer examination of beliefs and expectancies worthwhile in any context, but particularly so within the high-stakes arena of the legal system. Whether the decision maker is a police officer assessing the truthfulness of an alibi, a juror evaluating the accuracy of an eyewitness identification, an attorney arguing a case involving a juvenile offender, or a judge deciding whether to terminate parental rights these decisions matter and without doubt are influenced by beliefs and expectancies. This volume is comprised of research on beliefs and expectancies regarding alibis, children s behaviour while testifying, eyewitness testimony, confessions, sexual assault victims, judges decisions in child protection cases, and attorneys beliefs about jurors perceptions of juvenile offender culpability. Areas for future research are identified, and readers are encouraged to discover new ways that beliefs and expectancies operate in the legal system. This book was originally published as a special issue of "Psychology, Crime & Law.""
A vital resource on speech and language processing in bilingual adults and children The Listening Bilingual brings together in one volume the various components of spoken language processing in bilingual adults, infants and children. The book includes a review of speech perception and word recognition; syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of speech processing; the perception and comprehension of bilingual mixed speech (code-switches, borrowings and interferences); and the assessment of bilingual speech perception and comprehension in adults and children in the clinical context. The two main authors as well as selected guest authors, Mark Antoniou, Theres Gruter, Robert J. Hartsuiker, Elizabeth D. Pena and Lisa M. Bedore, and Lu-Feng Shi, introduce the various approaches used in the study of spoken language perception and comprehension in bilingual individuals. The authors focus on experimentation that involves both well-established tasks and newer tasks, as well as techniques used in brain imaging. This important resource: Is the first of its kind to concentrate specifically on spoken language processing in bilingual adults and children. Offers a unique text that covers both fundamental and applied research in bilinguals. Covers a range of topics including speech perception, spoken word recognition, higher level processing, code-switching, and assessment. Presents information on the assessment of bilingual children's language development Written for advanced undergraduate students in linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and speech/language pathology as well as researchers, The Listening Bilingual offers a state-of-the-art review of the recent developments and approaches in speech and language processing in bilingual people of all ages.
When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, thousands of people flocked to see where it had once been on display. Many of them had never seen the painting in the first place. What could have drawn these crowds to an empty space? And can this tell us something about why we look at art, why artists create it, and why it has to be so expensive? Taking the intriguing story of the Mona Lisa's two year disappearance as his starting point, Darian Leader explores the psychology of looking at visual art. What do paintings hide from us? Why should some artists feel compelled to lead lives that are more colourful than their works? And why did the police bungle their long investigation into the theft of Leonardo's masterpiece? Combining anecdote, observation and analysis, with examples taken from classical and contemporary art, Leader discusses such seminal figures as Leonardo, Picasso and Duchamp, as well as Bacon, Lowry and the Young British Artists. This is a book about why we look at art and what, indeed, we might be hoping to find.
Heroes are often admired for their ability to act without having "one thought too many," as Bernard Williams put it. Likewise, the unhesitating decisions of masterful athletes and artists are part of their fascination. Examples like these make clear that spontaneity can represent an ideal. However, recent literature in empirical psychology has shown how vulnerable our spontaneous inclinations can be to bias, shortsightedness, and irrationality. How can we make sense of these different roles that spontaneity plays in our lives? The central contention of this book is that understanding these two faces of spontaneity-its virtues and its vices-requires understanding the "implicit mind." In turn, understanding the implicit mind requires considering three sets of questions. The first set focuses on the architecture of the implicit mind itself. What kinds of mental states make up the implicit mind? Are both "virtue" and "vice" cases of spontaneity products of one and the same mental system? What kind of cognitive structure do these states have, if so? The second set of questions focuses on the relationship between the implicit mind and the self. How should we relate to our spontaneous inclinations and dispositions? Are they "ours," in the sense that they reflect on our character or identity? Are we responsible for them? The third set focuses on the ethics of spontaneity. What can research on self-regulation teach us about how to improve the ethics of our implicit minds? How can we enjoy the virtues of spontaneity without succumbing to its vices? Bringing together several streams of philosophical and psychological research, The Implicit Mind is the first book to offer a philosophical account of implicit attitudes.
The epistemology and the phenomenology of perception are closely related insofar as both depend on experiences of self-evident objectivity-experiences in which the objectivity of a state of affairs is evident from within our experience of that state of affairs. Jennifer Church offers a distinctive account of perception, showing how imagining alternative perspectives and alternative possibilities plays a key role in creating and validating experiences of self-evident objectivity. Offered first as an account of what it takes to perceive ordinary objects such as birds and trees, the account is then extended to show how it is also possible to perceive such things as causes, reasons, mental states, distant galaxies, molecular arrangements, mathematical relations, and interpersonal obligations. A chapter is devoted to the phenomenology and epistemology of moral perception, including the perception of persons as such; and a chapter is devoted to the peculiarities of aesthetic perception, including the perception of artworks as such. In all of these cases, Church argues, perception can be literal (not merely figurative or metaphorical) and substantive (not merely formal or deflationary). Her account helps to explain the advantages of perceptual versus non-perceptual knowledge. It also helps to make sense of some historical discussions of the role of the imagination in acquiring and validating knowledge, in relation to Plato's cave, Descartes' explanation of rational intuition, and Kant's arguments concerning objectivity, causality, and the Categorical Imperative.
"This volume is the most important if not the final word on the
great imagery debate. It examines issues critical to all cognition.
For example, whether the brain is a general purpose computer and if
the brain's structure imposes limits on what can be represented in
our minds." Michael I. Posner, Prof. Emeritus University of Oregon
-k No
To be a "commonsense realist" is to hold that perceptual experience is (in general) an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects, and a source of direct knowledge of what such objects are like. Over the past few centuries this view has faced formidable challenges from epistemology, metaphysics, and, more recently, cognitive science. However, in recent years there has been renewed interest in it, due to new work on perceptual consciousness, objectivity, and causal understanding. This volume collects nineteen original essays by leading philosophers and psychologists on these topics. Questions addressed include: What are the commitments of commonsense realism? Does it entail any particular view of the nature of perceptual experience, or any particular view of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge? Should we think of commonsense realism as a view held by some philosophers, or is there a sense in which we are pre-theoretically committed to commonsense realism in virtue of the experience we enjoy or the concepts we use or the explanations we give? Is commonsense realism defensible, and if so how, in the face of the formidable criticism it faces? Specific issues addressed in the philosophical essays include the status of causal requirements on perception, the causal role of perceptual experience, and the relation between objective perception and causal thinking. The scientific essays present a range of perspectives on the development, phylogenetic and ontogenetic, of the human adult conception of perception.
How do we see? This question has fascinated and perplexed philosophers and scientists for millennia. In visual perception, mind and world meet, when light reflected from objects enters the eyes and stimulates the nerves leading to activity in the brain near the back of the head. This neural activity yields conscious experiences of a world in three dimensions, clothed in colors, and immediately recognized as (say) ground, sky, grass, trees, and friends. The visual brain also produces nonconscious representations that interact with other brain systems for perception and cognition and that help to regulate our visually guided actions. But how does all of this really work? The answers concern the physiology, psychology, and philosophy of visual perception and cognition. Gary Hatfield's essays address fundamental questions concerning, in Part I, the psychological processes underlying spatial perception and perception of objects; in Part II, psychological theories and metaphysical controversies about color perception and qualia; and, in Part III, the history and philosophy of theories of vision, including methodological controversies surrounding introspection and involving the relations between psychology and the fields of neuroscience and cognitive science. An introductory chapter provides a unified overview; an extensive reference list rounds out the volume.
This Element outlines the recent understanding of ensemble representations in perception in a holistic way aimed to engage the general audience, novel and expert alike. The Element highlights the ubiquitous nature of this summary process, paving the way for a discussion of the theoretical and cortical underpinnings, and why ensemble encoding should be considered a basic, inherently necessary component of human perception. Following an overview of the topic, including a brief history of the field, the Element introduces overarching themes and a corresponding outline of the present work.
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.
In the last decade, there has been a tremendous surge of research on the mechanisms of human action. This volume brings together this new knowledge in a single, concise source, covering most if not all of the basic questions regarding human action: what are the mechanisms by which action plans are acquired, mentally represented, activated, selected, and expressed? The chapters provide up-to-date summaries of the published research on this question, with an emphasis on underlying mechanisms. This 'bible' of action research brings together the current thinking of eminent researchers in the domains of motor control, behavioural and cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, biology, as well as cognitive, developmental, social, and motivational psychology. It represents a determined multidisciplinary effort, spanning across various areas of science as well as national boundaries.
We effortlessly remember all sorts of events - from simple events like people walking to complex events like leaves blowing in the wind. We can also remember and describe these events, and in general, react appropriately to them, for example, in avoiding an approaching object. Our phenomenal ease interacting with events belies the complexity of the underlying processes we use to deal with them. Driven by an interest in these complex processes, research on even perception has been growing rapidly. Events are the basis of all experience, so understanding how humans perceive, represent, and act on them will have a significant impact on many areas of psychology. Unfortunately, much of the research on event perception - in visual perception, motor control, linguistics, and computer science - has progressed without much interaction. This book is the first to bring together computational, neurological, and psychological research on how humans detect, classify, remember, and act on events. It provides professional and student researchers with a comprehensive collection of the latest reserach in these diverse fields.
First published in 1995, 'The Visual Brain in Action' remains a
seminal publication in the cognitive sciences. It presents a model
for understanding the visual processing underlying perception and
action, proposing a broad distinction within the brain between two
kinds of vision: conscious perception and unconscious 'online'
vision. It argues that each kind of vision can occur
quasi-independently of the other, and is separately handled by a
quite different processing system. In the 11 years since
publication, the book has provoked considerable interest and debate
- throughout both cognitive neuroscience and philosophy, while the
field has continued to flourish and develop.
Graphs have become a fixture of everyday life, used in scientific and business publications, in magazines and newspapers, on television, on billboards, and even on cereal boxes. Nonetheless, surprisingly few graphs communicate effectively, and most graphs fail because they do not take into account the goals, needs, and abilities of the viewers. In raph Design for Eye and Mind, Stephen Kosslyn addresses these problems by presenting eight psychological principles for constructing effective graphs. Each principle is solidly rooted both in the scientific literature on how we perceive and comprehend graphs and in general facts about how our eyes and brains process visual information. Kosslyn then uses these eight psychological principles as the basis for hundreds of specific recommendations that serve as a concrete, step-by-step guide to deciding whether a graph is an appropriate display to use, choosing the correct type of graph for a specific type of data and message, and then constructing graphs that will be understood at a glance. Kosslyn also includes a complete review of the scientific literature on graph perception and comprehension, and appendices that provide a quick tutorial on basic statistics and a checklist for evaluating computer-graphics programs. Graph Design for Eye and Mind is an invaluable reference for anyone who uses visual displays to convey information in the sciences, humanities, and businesses such as finance, marketing, and advertising.
Whether it was the demands of life, leisure, or a combination of both that forced our hands, we have developed a myriad of artefacts--maps, notes, descriptions, diagrams, flow-charts, photographs, paintings, and prints--that stand for other things. Most agree that images and their close relatives are special because, in some sense, they look like what they are about. This simple claim is the starting point for most philosophical investigations into the nature of depiction. On Images argues that this starting point is fundamentally misguided. Whether a representation is an image depends not on how it is perceived but on how it relates to others within a system. This kind of approach, first championed by Nelson Goodman in his Languages of Art, has not found many supporters, in part because of weaknesses with Goodman's account. On Images shows that a properly crafted structural account of pictures has many advantages over the perceptual accounts that dominate the literature on this topic. In particular, it explains the close relationship between pictures, diagrams, graphs and other kinds of non-linguistic representation. It undermines the claim that pictures are essentially visual by showing that audio recordings, tactile line drawings, and other non-visual representations are pictorial. Also, by avoiding explaining images in terms of how we perceive them, this account sheds new light on why pictures seem so perceptually special in the first place. This discussion of picture perception recasts some old debates on the topic, suggests further lines of philosophical and empirical research, and ultimately leads to a new perspective on pictorial realism.
When we try to remember whether we left a window open or closed, do we actually see the window in our mind? If we do, does this mental image play a role in how we think? For almost a century, scientists have debated whether mental images play a functional role in cognition. In The Case for Mental Imagery, Stephen Kosslyn, William Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis present a complete and unified argument that mental images do depict information, and that these depictions do play a functional role in human cognition. They outline a specific theory of how depictive representations are used in information processing, and show how these representations arise from neural processes. To support this theory, they seamlessly weave together conceptual analyses and the many varied empirical findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. In doing so, they present the conceptual grounds for positing this type of internal representation and summarize and refute arguments to the contrary. Their argument also serves as a historical review of the imagery debate from its earliest inception to its most recent phases, and provides ample evidence that significant progress has been made in our understanding of mental imagery. In illustrating how scientists think about one of the most difficult problems in psychology and neuroscience, this book goes beyond the debate to explore the nature of cognition and to draw out implications for the study of consciousness. Student and professional researchers in vision science, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience will find The Case for Mental Imagery to be an invaluable resource for understanding not only the imagery debate, but also and more broadly, thenature of thought, and how theory and research shape the evolution of scientific debates.
In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical
interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of
the most fertile areas for new work. Perceptual Experience presents
new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers
are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range
of topics dealing with sensation and representation, consciousness
and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge
and between perception and action. This will be the book on the
philosophy of perception, a fascinating resource for philosophers
and psychologists.
Getting the Blues: Vision and Cognition in the Middle Ages is an interdisciplinary study of medieval color. By integrating scientific and literary approaches, it revises our current understanding of how people in medieval Europe experienced color and what it meant to them. This book insists that the past perception of the world can be recovered by joining timeless universal constraints on human experience (discovered by science) to the unique cultural expressions of that experience (revealed by literature). The Middle Ages may evoke images of the multicolored stained glass of gothic cathedrals, the motley garb of minstrels, or the brilliant illuminations of manuscripts, yet such color often goes unnoticed in scholarly accounts of medieval literature. Getting the Blues restores some of the most important literary works of the Middle Ages to their full living color. Particular consideration is given to the twelfth-century Arthurian romances by Chretien de Troyes and the thirteenth-century Lancelot-Grail Cycle. Getting the Blues engages debates within the humanities and the sciences over universalist and relativist approaches to how humans see and name color. Scholars in the humanities often insist that color is a strictly cultural phenomenon, eschewing as irrelevant to the Middle Ages recent developments in cognitive science that show universal constraints on how people in all cultures see and name color. This book contributes to the recent cognitive turn in the humanities and sheds new light on some of the most frequent and meaningful cultural experiences in the Middle Ages: the perception, use, and naming of color.
Whether reading, looking at a picture, or driving, how is it that we know where to look next - how does the human visual system calculate where our gaze should be directed in order to achieve our cognitive aims? Of course, there is an interaction between the decisions about where we should look and about how long we should look there. However, our eyes do not just move randomly over the visual field - whether we are reading, driving, or solving a problem. There are systematic variations not only in the duration of each eye fixation, but also in what we are looking at. It is these variations in eye movements that can tell us much about the cognitive processes involved in the performance of these activities. Within reading research, great progress has already been made in understanding these processes and there are now a number of competing and well-formed models. In some other areas of perception, the development of formal theories and the search for critical evidence is less advanced. This book brings together leading vision scientists studying eye movements across a range of activities, such as reading, driving, computer activities, and chess. It provides groundbreaking new research that will help us understand how it is that we know where to move our eyes, and thereby better understand the cognitive processes underlying these activities.
Adaptation phenomena provide striking examples of perceptual plasticity and offer valuable insight into the mechanisms of visual coding. The technique of psychophysical adaptation has aptly been termed the psychologist's microelectrode because of its usefulness in investigating the coding of sensory information in the human brain. Its broader relevance though is illustrated by the increasing use of adaptation to study more cognitive aspects of vision such as the mechanisms of face perception and the neural substrates of visual awareness. This book brings together a collection of studies from international researchers, which demonstrate the brain's remarkable capacity to adapt its representation of the visual world in response to changes in its environment. A major theme throughout is that adaptation at all stages of visual processing serves a functional role in the efficient representation of the prevailing visual environment. Information about the visual world is coded in the rate at which neurons fire. However, neurons can only respond over a certain range of firing rates. Adaptation of the way in which neurons code visual information tends to make optimal use of this limited response range. Though these principles are well established at the level of light adaptation in the retina, it is only relatively recently that researchers have started to look for analogous behaviour at the higher levels of the visual system. This book is the first to bring together evidence that adaptation in high-level vision, as at the lower levels, serves to fit the mind to the world.
Colour has long been a source of fascination to both scientists and philosophers. In one sense, colours are in the mind of the beholder, in another sense they belong to the external world. Colours appear to lie on the boundary where we have divided the world into 'objective' and 'subjective' events. They represent, more than any other attribute of our visual experience, a place where both physical and mental properties are interwoven in an intimate and enigmatic way. The last few decades have brought fascinating changes in the way that we think about 'colour' and the role 'colour' plays in our perceptual architecture. In Colour: Mind and the Physical World, leading scholars from cognitive psychology, philosophy, neurophysiology, and computational vision provide an overview of the contemporary developments in our understanding of colours and of the relationship between the 'mental' and the 'physical'. With each chapter followed by critical commentaries, the volume presents a lively and accessible picture of the intellectual traditions which have shaped research into colour perception. Written in a non-technical style and accessible to an interdisciplinary audience, the book will provide an invaluable resource for researchers in colour perception and the cognitive sciences.
Maintaining the strong pedagogy, abundant student-friendly examples, and engaging conversational style of the previous editions, the sixth edition of this introductory textbook makes technical scientific information accessible to those who are beginning to specialize in cognitive psychology. Sensation and Perception, Sixth Edition is newly available in a more affordable paperback version, making it ideal for undergraduate students. In this new edition Bates has built on Foley and Matlin's core text to add updates focusing on multisensory integration, neural plasticity, and cognitive neuroscience, as well as real-world examples and practical applications of psychological phenomena. The sixth edition retains the clear organization of previous versions, covering a wide range of core topics, from skin senses such as touch to chemical senses such as taste and smell, to our complex visual and auditory sensory systems. This book is essential reading for undergraduates and postgraduates studying courses on sensation and perception. |
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