This book evaluates the potential of the pragmatist notion of habit possesses to influence current debates at the crossroads between philosophy, cognitive sciences, neurosciences, and social theory. It deals with the different aspects of the pragmatic turn involved in 4E cognitive science and traces back the roots of such a pragmatic turn to both classical and contemporary pragmatism. Written by renowned philosophers, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and social theorists, this volume fills the need for an interdisciplinary account of the role of 'habit'. Researchers interested in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, social theory, and social ontology will need this book to fully understand the pragmatist turn in current research on mind, action and society.

The latest volume in the critically acclaimed and highly influential Attention and Performance series focuses on a subject at the heart of psychological research into human performance - the interplay between perception and action. What are the mechanisms that translate the information we receive via our senses into physical actions? How do the mechanisms responsible for producing a response from a given stimulus operate? Recently, new perspectives have emerged, drawing on studies from neuroscience and neurophysiology. Within this volume, state of the art and cutting edge research from leading scientists in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience is presented describing the approaches being taken to understanding the mechanisms that allow us to negotiate and respond to the world around us.

In communities plagued by conflict along ethnic, racial, and religious lines, how does the representation of previously-marginalized groups in the police affect crime and security? Drawing on new evidence from policing in Iraq and Israel, Policing for Peace shows that an inclusive police force provides better services and reduces conflict, but not in the ways we might assume. Including members of marginalized groups in the police improves civilians' expectations of how the police and government will treat them, both now and in the future. These expectations are enhanced when officers are organized into mixed rather than homogeneous patrols. Iraqis indicate feeling most secure when policed by mixed officers, even more secure than they feel when policed by members of their own group. In Israel, increases in police officer diversity are associated with lower crime victimization for both Arab and Jewish citizens. In many cases, inclusive policing benefits all citizens, not just those from marginalized groups.

Can we learn without consciousness? When the eminent neuropsychologist, Lawrence Weiskrantz first coined the term 'blindsight' to describe a condition whereby a patient could demonstrate that they were aware of some object, yet insist that they were completely unaware of its existence, the response from some in the scientific community was one of extreme skepticism. Even now, there are those who question the existence of unconscious (implicit) learning, and the topic remains one of the most actively researched and debated in psychology. In recent years evidence for unconscious processing across a range of sensory modalities have come from studies of vision, audition, memory, emotion, and action. Never before have these studies of unconscious processing in the different senses been brought together into a single volume. In a book dedicated to Lawrence Weiskrantz, some of the leading psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists of the day explain what we know about unconscious processing in the different senses. Including contributions from, amongst others, David Milner, Jon Driver, Alan Cowey, and Ray Dolan, the book presents a state of the art account of what we now know about 'the unconscious'. The book will provide a fascinating account for students and researchers in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy.

For psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists interested in 'attention', the issue of the 'limits' of our attentional mechanisms is one of great importance and topicality- what are the temporal constraints when we attend to and process information How well can we switch our attention from one task to another, or from one sensory modality to another? In what circumstances can the presentation of one stimulus prevent the recognition of a further stimulus? By seeking answers to such questions, we can learn a great deal about the systems underlying such attentional processes, develop more accurate models of our attentional mechanisms, and even get closer to answering some of the many outstanding questions about consciousness itself. In The limits of attention, Kimrom Shapiro whose own work on the 'attentional blink' is central to this debate, has brought together a high quality team of attention researchers to discuss and debate these issues, key to the study of attention. This is an important book for cognitive psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and philosophers.

Understanding how objects are partitioned into useful groups to form concepts is important to most disciplines. Concepts allow us to treat different objects equivalently according to shared attributes, and hence to communicate about, draw inferences from, reason with, and explain these objects. Understanding how concepts are formed and used is thus essential to understanding and applying these basic processes, and the topic of similarity-based classification is central to psychology, artificial intelligence, statistics, and philosophy. Similarity and Categorisation provides a uniquely interdisciplinary overview of this area. The book brings together leading researchers, reflecting the key topics and important developments in the field. It will be of interest to researchers and graduate students within the areas of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and philosophy.

Spatial Representation presents original, specially written essays by leading psychologists and philosophers on a fascinating set of topics at the intersection of these two disciplines. Each of the five sections covers a central area of research into spatial cognition and opens with a short introduction by the editors, designed to facilitate cross-disciplinary reading. The volume offers a rich and compelling expression of the view that to advance our understanding of the way we represent the external world it is necessary to draw on both philosophical and psychological approaches.

Concentrating mainly on visual perception, this book introduces students to the basic biological and psychological processes and their development. It discusses influences on perception such as pattern recognition, culture and attention and includes a brief discussion of Artificial intelligence.

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A topic of universal concern that touches everyone, philosophy of meaning in life has roots in spiritual and religious movements in almost all cultures. Many of the issues dealt with in these movements, such as human vocation, the life worth living, our relation to what is "greater" than us, and our encounters with suffering and with death, are also discussed (even if in a different manner) in the philosophy of meaning in life. However, only recently has the topic received elaborate discussion within analytic philosophy, and become a thriving field of research. This volume presents thirty-two chapters by leading authorities in their respective subfields on a wide array of subjects in meaning in life research. The chapters are organized into six sections. Section I focuses on ways of conceptualizing life's meaning. It discusses, among other issues, whether meaning in life should be understood objectively or subjectively, the relation between meaningfulness and importance, and whether meaningful lives should be understood narratively. Section II, Meaning in Life, Science, and Metaphysics, presents opposing views on whether neuroscience sheds light on life's meaning, inquires whether determinism must render life meaningless, and explores the relation between time, personal identity, and meaning in life. Section III considers life's meaning from both atheist and theist perspectives, and examines the relation between meaningfulness, mysticism and transcendence. Section IV, Ethics and Meaning in Life, examines (among other issues) whether meaningful lives must be moral, how important forgiveness is for meaning, the implications of life's meaningfulness or meaninglessness for procreation ethics, and whether animals can have meaningful lives. Section V compares philosophical and psychological research on life's meaning, explores the experience of meaningfulness, and discusses the relation between meaningfulness and desire, love, and gratitude. Finally, section VI, Living Meaningfully: Challenges and Prospects, elaborates on meaning in life and topics such as suicide, suffering, education, optimism and pessimism. Many of the chapters deal with topics that have never before been discussed in the literature. This handbook presents ground-breaking work within a rapidly developing field and offers the first published scholarly companion to the philosophical study if meaning in life.

This Element reviews literature on the physiological influences of music during perception and action. It outlines how acoustic features of music influence physiological responses during passive listening, with an emphasis on comparisons of analytical approaches. It then considers specific behavioural contexts in which physiological responses to music impact perception and performance. First, it describes physiological responses to music that evoke an emotional reaction in listeners. Second, it delineates how music influences physiology during music performance and exercise. Finally, it discusses the role of music perception in pain, focusing on medical procedures and laboratory-induced pain with infants and adults.

This is the fifth volume in the Vancouver Studies of Cognitive Science Series, an interdisciplinary series bringing together topics of interest to psychologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and linguists. Perception covers the problem of depth perception, the interaction of perception and memory, the perception of time, and principles of vision. All chapters focus on fundamental questions about the nature of visual perception.

This book offers a contemporary philosophy of life drawing upon Buddhist resources from the Vimalakirti Sutra. Among the major themes in this Mahayana Buddhist scripture is the "skillful means" required to live a healthy and undeluded life. The book adopts that theme as a means of developing a practical approach to contemporary Buddhist life. Following many of the brilliant stories in the sutra, this book attempts to provide clear explanations for the primary Buddhist teachings and the relationships that bind them all together into an inspiring way of living. Among the questions addressed are: who is the Buddha, how is a worldview of change and contingency applicable to current life, what does it mean to claim that there is no permanent self, what are the primary characteristics of an admirable Buddhist life, how is freedom conceived in Buddhism, and how do all of these themes help us address issues that are pressing for us today. Although historical questions do arise in the book, its primary purpose is contemporary and practical, an effort to say clearly how this text helps us stake out a way of living for contemporary, global citizens.

Even the simplest social interactions require us to gather, integrate, and act upon, multiple streams of information about others and our surroundings. In this Element, we discuss how perceptual processes provide us with an accurate account of action-relevant information in social contexts. We overview contemporary theories and research that explores how: (1) individuals perceive others' mental states and actions, (2) individuals perceive affordances for themselves, others, and the dyad, and (3) how social contexts guide our attention to modulate what we perceive. Finally, we review work on the cognitive mechanisms that make joint action possible and discuss their links to perception.

'Highly accessible, content-rich and eminently readable . . . Fascinating and informative . . . popular science at its best.' - The Observer 'Subtly radical . . . It presents a revelatory model of consciousness that will be completely new to most readers' - The Guardian 'Best Reads For Summer' Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, bestselling author of How Emotions Are Made, demystify that big grey blob between your ears . . . In seven short chapters (plus a brief history of how brains evolved), this slim, entertaining, and accessible book reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You'll learn where brains came from, how they're structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience. Along the way, you'll also learn to dismiss popular myths such as the idea of a 'lizard brain' and the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions, or even between nature and nurture, to determine your behaviour. Sure to intrigue casual readers and scientific veterans alike, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is full of surprises, humour, and important implications for human nature - a gift of a book about our most complex and crucial organ.

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.

This Element examines visual perception in the context of activities that involve moving about in complex, dynamic environments. A central theme is that the ability of humans and other animals to perceive their surroundings based on vision is profoundly shaped by the need to adaptively regulate locomotion to variations in the environment. As such, important new insights into what and how we perceive can be gleaned by investigating the connection between vision and the control of locomotion. I present an integrated summary of decades of research on the perception of self-motion and object motion based on optic flow, the perception of spatial layout and affordances, and the control strategies for guiding locomotion based on visual information. I also explore important theoretical issues and debates, including the question of whether visual control relies on internal models.

This book tells the amazing story of perception -- how experiences are created by your senses and how you use these experiences to interact with the environment. You might be surprised to know that although perception is easy -- we see, hear, feel touch, and experience taste and smell without much effort -- the mechanisms that create perceptions are both extremely complex and hidden from our view. SENSATION AND PERCEPTION unravels these complexities by taking you on a journey that describes perceptual research in a clear easy-to-understand way, and by linking the results of this research to your everyday experience. The text is supported by beautiful color illustrations, a media program that makes perception come alive (in the MindTap digital learning solution), and learning aids to help you understand and remember what you have read.

Our experience of the world is influenced by numerous spatial biases, most of which influence us without our being aware of them. These biases are related to illusions and asymmetries in our perception of space, relationships between space and other qualities, dynamics of moving objects, dynamics of scene configuration, and dynamics related to perception and action. Consideration of these biases provides insight into how we perceive, remember, and navigate space, as well as how we interact with objects and people in space. This volume introduces and reviews numerous spatial biases, and provides descriptions and examples of each bias. The contributors discuss historical and current theories for many biases, and for some biases, provide new explanatory theories. Providing a 'one-stop shop' for information on such a key aspect of our experience in the world, this volume will interest anyone curious about our understanding of space.

'In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principle themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger.' - James Elkins

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most important thinkers of the post-war era. Central to his thought was the idea that human understanding comes from our bodily experience of the world that we perceive: a deceptively simple argument, perhaps, but one that he felt had to be made in the wake of attacks from contemporary science and the philosophy of Descartes on the reliability of human perception.

From this starting point, Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception to French radio listeners in 1948. Available in a paperback English translation for the first time in the Routledge Classics series to mark the centenary of Merleau-Ponty 's birth, this is a dazzling and accessible guide to a whole universe of experience, from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, through the psychic life of animals to the glories of the art of Paul C zanne.

This volume provides an introduction to and review of key contemporary debates concerning connectionism, and the nature of explanation and methodology in cognitive psychology.
The first debate centers on the question of whether human cognition is best modeled by classical or by connectionist architectures. The second centres on the question of the compatibility between folk, or commonsense, psychological explanation and explanations based on connectionist models of cognition. Each of the two sections includes a classic reading along with important responses, and concludes with a specially commissioned reply by the main contributor. The editorial introductions provide a comprehensive survey and map through the debates.

The interactions between the senses are essential for cognitive functions such as perception, attention, and action planning. Past research helped understanding of multisensory processes in the laboratory. Yet, the efforts to extrapolate these findings to the real-world are scarce. Extrapolation to real-world contexts is important for practical and theoretical reasons. Multisensory phenomena might be expressed differently in real-world settings compared to simpler laboratory situations. Some effects might become stronger, others may disappear, and new outcomes could be discovered. This Element discusses research that uncovers multisensory interactions under complex environments, with an emphasis on the interplay of multisensory mechanisms with other processes.

Hypothesis testing is a common statistical analysis for empirical data generated by studies of perception, but its properties and limitations are widely misunderstood. This Element describes several properties of hypothesis testing, with special emphasis on analyses common to studies of perception. The author also describes the challenges and difficulties with using hypothesis testing to interpret empirical data. Many common applications of hypothesis testing inflate the intended Type I error rate. Other aspects of hypothesis tests have important implications for experimental design. Solutions are available for some of these difficulties, but many issues are difficult to deal with.

We make 3-5 eye movements per second, and these movements are crucial in helping us deal with the vast amounts of information we encounter in our everyday lives. In recent years, thanks to the development of eye tracking technology, there has been a growing interest in monitoring and measuring these movements, with a view to understanding how we attend to and process the visual information we encounter Eye tracking as a research tool is now more accessible than ever, and is growing in popularity amongst researchers from a whole host of different disciplines. Usability analysts, sports scientists, cognitive psychologists, reading researchers, psycholinguists, neurophysiologists, electrical engineers, and others, all have a vested interest in eye tracking for different reasons. The ability to record eye-movements has helped advance our science and led to technological innovations. However, the growth of eye tracking in recent years has also presented a variety of challenges - in particular the issue of how to design an eye-tracking experiment, and how to analyse the data. This book is a much needed comprehensive handbook of eye tracking methodology. It describes how to evaluate and acquire an eye-tracker, how to plan and design an eye tracking study, and how to record and analyse eye-movement data. Besides technical details and theory, the heart of this book revolves around practicality - how raw data samples are converted into fixations and saccades using event detection algorithms, how the different representations of eye movement data are calculated using AOIs, heat maps and scanpaths, and how all the measures of eye movements relate to these processes. Part I presents the technology and skills needed to perform high-quality research with eye-trackers. Part II covers the predominant methods applied to the data which eye-trackers record. These include the parsing of raw sample data into oculomotor events, and how to calculate other representations of eye movements such as heat maps and transition matrices. Part III gives a comprehensive outline of the measures which can be calculated using the events and representations described in Part II. This is a taxonomy of the measures available to eye-tracking researchers, sorted by type of movement of the eyes and type of analysis. For anyone in the sciences considering conducting research involving eye-tracking, this book will be an essential reference work.

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

Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield knowledge of our environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? This book presents a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities - for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence.