Is it reasonable to live a religiously oriented life, or is such a life the height of irrationality? Has neuroscience shown that religious experiences are akin to delusions, or might neuroscience actually support the validity of such experiences? In Living Religion James W. Jones offers a new approach to understanding religion after the Decade of the Brain. The modern tendency to separate theory from practice gives rise to a number of dilemmas for those who think seriously about religion. Claims about God, the world, and the nature and destiny of the human spirit have been ripped from their context in religious practice and treated as doctrinal abstractions to be justified or refuted in isolation from the living religious life that is their natural home. Jones argues that trends in contemporary psychology, especially an emphasis on embodiment and relationality, can help the thoughtful religious person return theory to practice, thereby opening up new avenues of religious knowing and new ways of supporting the commitment to a religiously lived life. This embodied-relational model offers new ways of understanding our capacity to transform and transcend our ordinary awareness and shows that it can be meaningful and reasonable to speak of a "spiritual sense." The brain's complexity, integration, and openness, and the many ways embodiment influences our understanding of ourselves and the world, all significantly impact our thinking about religious understanding. When linked to contemporary neuroscientific theories, the long-standing tradition of a spiritual sense is brought up to date and deployed in support of the argument of this book that reason is on the side of those who choose a religiously lived life.

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.

The World In Your Head: A Gestalt View of the Mechanism of Conscious Experience represents a bold assault on one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in science: the nature of consciousness and the human mind. Rather than examining the brain and nervous system to see what they tell us about the mind, this book begins with an examination of conscious experience to see what it can tell us about the brain. Through this analysis, the first and most obvious observation is that consciousness appears as a volumetric spatial void, containing colored objects and surfaces. This reveals that the representation in the brain takes the form of an explicit volumetric spatial model of external reality. Therefore, the world we see around us is not the real world itself, but merely a miniature virtual-reality replica of that world in an internal representation. In fact, the phenomena of dreams and hallucinations clearly demonstrate the capacity of the brain to construct complete virtual worlds even in the absence of sensory input. Perception is somewhat like a guided hallucination, based on sensory stimulation. This insight allows us to examine the world of visual experience not as scientists exploring the external world, but as perceptual scientists examining a rich and complex internal representation. This unique approach to investigating mental function has implications in a wide variety of related fields, including the nature of language and abstract thought, and motor control and behavior. It also has implications to the world of music, art, and dance, showing how the patterns of regularity and periodicity in space and time--apparent in those aesthetic domains--reflect the periodic basis set of the underlying harmonic resonance representation in the brain.

Are humans effective thinkers? How do we decide what is right? Can we avoid being duped by fake news? Thinking and Reasoning is the study of how humans think; exploring rationality, decision making and judgment within all contexts of life. With contemporary case studies and reflective questions to develop your understanding of key dilemmas, this book covers the fundamentals of the science behind thinking, reasoning, and decision-making, making it essential reading for any student of Thinking and Reasoning. From heuristic biases to the cognitive science of religion, and from artificial intelligence to conspiracy theories, Wastell & Howarth's text clearly and comprehensibly introduces you to the core theories of thinking, leaving no stone unturned, before showing you how to apply theory to practice. 'The unique selling point of the book is the inclusion of current topics and recent developments, a very good structure and it approaches the field from a very wide angle.'

Measurements with persons are those in which human perception and interpretation are used for measuring complex, holistic quantities and qualities, which are perceived by the human brain and mind. Providing means for reproducible measurement of parameters such as pleasure and pain has important implications in evaluating all kind of products, services, and conditions.

This book inaugurates a new era for this subject: a multi- and inter-disciplinary volume in which world-renowned scientists from the psychological, physical, biological, and social sciences reach a common understanding of measurement theory and methods.

In the first section, generic theoretical and methodological issues are treated, including the conceptual basis of measurement in the various fields involved; the development of formal, representational, and probabilistic theories; the approach to experimentation; and the theories, models, and methods for multidimensional problems. In the second section, several implementation areas are presented, including sound, visual, skin, and odor perception, functional brain imagining, body language and emotions, and, finally, the use of measurements in decision making

Measurement with Persons will appeal to a wide audience across a range of sciences, including general psychology and psychophysics, measurement theory, metrology and instrumentation, neurophysiology, engineering, biology, and chemistry.

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 study of sensation and perception looks at how we acquire, process, and interpret information about the outside world. By describing key ideas from first principles, this straightforward introduction provides easy access to the basic concepts in the subject, and incorporates the most recent advances with useful historical background. The text takes a uniquely integrative approach, highlighting fundamental findings that apply across all the senses - including vision, hearing, touch, pain, balance, smell and taste - rather than considering each sense in isolation. Several pedagogical features help students to engage with the material. 'Key Term' and 'Key Concept' boxes describe technical terms and concepts whilst 'Question' boxes relate the material to everyday questions about perception. Each chapter ends with suggestions for further reading, and the final chapter draws together the material from the previous chapters, summarizing the broad principles described, and outlining some major unresolved issues. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book is an accessible and up-to-date overview of the processes of human sensation and perception. Presented in full color, it is an ideal introduction for pre-undergraduate and first year undergraduate students on courses in psychology, as well as neuroscience and biology.

The study of sensation and perception looks at how we acquire, process, and interpret information about the outside world. By describing key ideas from first principles, this straightforward introduction provides easy access to the basic concepts in the subject, and incorporates the most recent advances with useful historical background. The text takes a uniquely integrative approach, highlighting fundamental findings that apply across all the senses - including vision, hearing, touch, pain, balance, smell and taste - rather than considering each sense in isolation. Several pedagogical features help students to engage with the material. 'Key Term' and 'Key Concept' boxes describe technical terms and concepts whilst 'Question' boxes relate the material to everyday questions about perception. Each chapter ends with suggestions for further reading, and the final chapter draws together the material from the previous chapters, summarizing the broad principles described, and outlining some major unresolved issues. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book is an accessible and up-to-date overview of the processes of human sensation and perception. Presented in full color, it is an ideal introduction for pre-undergraduate and first year undergraduate students on courses in psychology, as well as neuroscience and biology.

"This book introduces human visual perception to readers studying or working in the field of computer graphics, though it may also be of use to perceptual psychologists using computer graphics to generate experimental stimuli, directly investigating the perceptual effectiveness of some aspect of computer graphics, or interested in perceptual topics relevant to the information content of images but not included in most standard vision science references. The book can be used either as a text for an advanced undergraduate or graduate course or as an overview of perception for those active as researchers or developers in computer graphics or related fields"--

A curious ambiguity surrounds errors in professional working contexts: they must be avoided in case they lead to adverse (and potentially disastrous) results, yet they also hold the key to improving our knowledge and procedures. In a further irony, it seems that a prerequisite for circumventing errors is our remaining open to their potential occurrence and learning from them when they do happen. This volume, the first to integrate interdisciplinary perspectives on learning from errors at work, presents theoretical concepts and empirical evidence in an attempt to establish under what conditions professionals deal with errors at work productively-in other words, learn the lessons they contain. By drawing upon and combining cognitive and action-oriented approaches to human error with theories of adult, professional, and workplace learning this book provides valuable insights which can be applied by workers and professionals. It includes systematic theoretical frameworks for explaining learning from errors in daily working life, methodologies and research instruments that facilitate the measurement of that learning, and empirical studies that investigate relevant determinants of learning from errors in different professions. Written by an international group of distinguished researchers from various disciplines, the chapters paint a comprehensive picture of the current state of the art in research on human fallibility and (learning from) errors at work.

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.

A unique collection of contemporary writings, this book explores the politics involved in the making and experiencing of architecture and cities from a cross-cultural and global perspective

Taking a broad view of the word a ~politicsa (TM), the essays address a range of questions, including:

• What is the relationship between politics and the making of space?
• What role has theory played in reinforcing or resisting political power?
• What are the political difficulties associated with working relationships?
• Do the products of our making construct our identity or liberate us?

A timely volume, focusing on an interdisciplinary debate on the politics of making, this is valuable reading for all students, professionals and academics interested or working in architectural theory.

Body and space refer to vital and interrelated dimensions in the experience of sounds and music. Sounds have an overwhelming impact on feelings of bodily presence and inform us about the space we experience. Even in situations where visual information is artificial or blurred, such as in virtual environments or certain genres of film and computer games, sounds may shape our perceptions and lead to surprising new experiences. This book discusses recent developments in a range of interdisciplinary fields, taking into account the rapidly changing ways of experiencing sounds and music, the consequences for how we engage with sonic events in daily life and the technological advancements that offer insights into state-of-the-art methods and future perspectives. Topics range from the pleasures of being locked into the beat of the music, perception-action coupling and bodily resonance, and affordances of musical instruments, to neural processing and cross-modal experiences of space and pitch. Applications of these findings are discussed for movement sonification, room acoustics, networked performance, and for the spatial coordination of movements in dance, computer gaming and interactive artistic installations.

This book is a collection of Leea (TM)s most important works, placed in a historical setting and contextualized through the commentaries of other leading researchers in the field. The contributors were selected on the basis of their standing in the field. Some have been directly involved in collaborations with Lee, while others have participated in public discussions on particular controversies. All contributors know David Lee well as a researcher and scholar, and some know him on a more personal levela "as a student, supervisor, mentor, or friend. It is this mixture of involvements with David Lee and his writings that yields a unique exchange of ideas on the origins of movement. Closing the Gap: The Scientific Writings of David N. Lee is an invaluable resource for academics and postgraduate students studying perceptuo-motor control.

This book is a collection of Leea (TM)s most important works, placed in a historical setting and contextualized through the commentaries of other leading researchers in the field. The contributors were selected on the basis of their standing in the field. Some have been directly involved in collaborations with Lee, while others have participated in public discussions on particular controversies. All contributors know David Lee well as a researcher and scholar, and some know him on a more personal levela "as a student, supervisor, mentor, or friend. It is this mixture of involvements with David Lee and his writings that yields a unique exchange of ideas on the origins of movement. Closing the Gap: The Scientific Writings of David N. Lee is an invaluable resource for academics and postgraduate students studying perceptuo-motor control.

Research on attention has evolved dramatically since the early work of the 1950s, and even in the few years since the publication of the first edition of this book. There have been significant changes in the study of how we are able to select some aspects for processing and ignore others, and how we are able to combine tasks, learn skills and make intentional actions. Attention is now increasingly seen as a complex process intimately linked with perception, memory and action. New questions are continually being addressed in the area of crossmodal attention and there have been important developments in brain imaging, which allow new insights into the biological bases of attention.
After an initial consideration of what attention might be, this book charts the development in the ideas and theories which surround the field. An entirely new chapter addresses the nature of auditory attention and the question of how visual and auditory attention are combined across modalities. The problems of task combination, skill acquisition and automaticity are considered, as well as the selection and control of action, and conscious and unconscious processing.
"The Psychology of Attention, Second Edition" provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to this fascinating and rapidly developing field.

Research on attention has evolved dramatically since the early work of the 1950s, and even in the few years since the publication of the first edition of this book. There have been significant changes in the study of how we are able to select some aspects for processing and ignore others, and how we are able to combine tasks, learn skills and make intentional actions. Attention is now increasingly seen as a complex process intimately linked with perception, memory and action. New questions are continually being addressed in the area of crossmodal attention and there have been important developments in brain imaging, which allow new insights into the biological bases of attention.
After an initial consideration of what attention might be, this book charts the development in the ideas and theories which surround the field. An entirely new chapter addresses the nature of auditory attention and the question of how visual and auditory attention are combined across modalities. The problems of task combination, skill acquisition and automaticity are considered, as well as the selection and control of action, and conscious and unconscious processing.
"The Psychology of Attention, Second Edition" provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to this fascinating and rapidly developing field.

"Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own."
In 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote and delivered on French radio a series of seven lectures on the theme of perception. Translated here into English for the first time, they offer a lucid and concise insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth-century.
The lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but to phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the idea - inherited from Descartes and influential within science - that perception is unreliable, prone to distort the world around us. Merleau-Ponty instead argues that perception is inseparable from our senses and it is how we make sense of the world.
Merleau-Ponty explores this guiding theme through a brilliant series of reflections on science, space, our relationships with others, animal life and art. Throughout, he argues that perception is never something learned and then applied to the world. Ascreatures with embodied minds, he reminds us that we are born perceiving and share with other animals and infants a state of constant, raw, unpredictable contact with the world. He provides vivid examples with the help of Kafka, animal behavior and above all modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne.
A thought-provoking and crystalline exploration of consciousness and the senses, "The World of" "Perception" is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Merleau-Ponty, twentieth-century philosophy and art.

Contents:
Prologue. Part I: Considerations. The Problem and the Approach. Types of Tasks and Instructions. The Internal Representation of the Instruction. Part II: Report Tasks. An Intentional Machine. Paradigms with Accuracy as the Dependent Variable. Paradigms with Latency as the Dependent Variable. Part III: Act Tasks. Towards an Effective Visual Position. The Cognitive Control of Saccadic Eye Movements. Act Tasks and Report Tasks. Epilogue.

Experts from wine tasters to radiologists to bird watchers have all undergone perceptual learning-long-term changes in perception that result from practice or experience. Philosophers have been discussing such cases for centuries, from the 14th-century Indian philosopher Vedanta Desika to the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, and into contemporary times. This book uses recent evidence from psychology and neuroscience to show that perceptual learning is genuinely perceptual, rather than post-perceptual. It also offers a taxonomy for classifying cases in the philosophical literature. In some cases, perceptual learning involves changes in how one attends; in other cases, it involves a learned ability to differentiate two properties, or to perceive two properties as unified. Connolly uses this taxonomy to rethink several domains of perception in terms of perceptual learning, including multisensory perception, color perception, and speech perception. As a whole, the book offers a theory of the function of perceptual learning. Perceptual learning embeds into our quick perceptual systems what would be a slower task were it to be done in a controlled, cognitive manner. A novice wine taster drinking a Cabernet Sauvignon might have to think about its features first and then infer the type of wine, while an expert can identify it immediately. This learned ability to immediately identify the wine enables the expert to think about other things like the vineyard or the vintage of the wine. More generally, perceptual learning serves to free up cognitive resources for other tasks. This book offers a comprehensive empirically-informed account, and explores the nature, scope, and theoretical implications of perceptual learning.

Scientists' understanding of two central problems in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy has been greatly influenced by the work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel: (1) What is it to see? This relates to the machinery that underlies visual perception. (2) How do we acquire the brain's mechanisms for vision? This is the nature-nurture question as to whether the nerve connections responsible for vision are innate or whether they develop through experience in the early life of an animal or human. This is a book about the collaboration between Hubel and Wiesel, which began in 1958, lasted until about 1982, and led to a Nobel Prize in 1981. It opens with short autobiographies of both men, describes the state of the field when they started, and tells about the beginnings of their collaboration. It emphasizes the importance of various mentors in their lives, especially Stephen W. Kuffler, who opened up the field by studying the cat retina in 1950, and founded the department of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, where most of their work was done. The main part of the book consists of Hubel and Wiesel's most important publications. Each reprinted paper is preceded by a foreword that tells how they went about the research, what the difficulties and the pleasures were, and whether they felt a paper was important and why. Each is also followed by an afterword describing how the paper was received and what developments have occurred since its publication. The reader learns things that are often absent from typical scientific publications, including whether the work was difficult, fun, personally rewarding, exhilarating, or just plain tedious. The book ends with a summing-up of the authors'view of the present state of the field. This is much more than a collection of reprinted papers. Above all it tells the story of an unusual scientific collaboration that was hugely enjoyable and served to transform an entire branch of neurobiology. It will appeal to neuroscientists, vision scientists, biologists, psychologists, physicists, historians of science, and to their students and trainees, at all levels from high school on, as well as anyone else who is interested in the scientific process.

Why do we enjoy art? What inspires us to create artistic works? How can brain science help us understand our taste in art?

The Psychology of Art provides an eclectic introduction to the myriad ways in which psychology can help us understand and appreciate creative activities. Exploring how we perceive everything from colour to motion, the book examines art-making as a form of human behaviour that stretches back throughout history as a constant source of inspiration, conflict and conversation. It also considers how factors such as fakery, reproduction technology and sexism influence our judgements about art.

By asking what psychological science has to do with artistic appreciation, The Psychology of Art introduces the reader to new ways of thinking about how we create and consume art.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Art and psychology

2. The neuroscience of art

3. Why do we engage in art?

4. Depicting space, contour and form in art

5. Depicting colour and motion in art

6. What makes great art?

7. Creativity in art and science

Further reading

Bibliography

Our minds are severely limited in how much information they can extensively process, in spite of being massively parallel at the visual end. When people attempt to track moving objects, only a limited number can be tracked, which varies with display parameters. Associated experiments indicate that spatial selection and updating has higher capacity than selection and updating of features such as color and shape, and is mediated by processes specific to each cerebral hemisphere, such that each hemifield has its own spatial tracking limit. These spatial selection processes act as a bottleneck that gate subsequent processing. To improve our understanding of this bottleneck, future work should strive to avoid contamination of tracking tasks by high-level cognition. While we are far from fully understanding how attention keeps up with multiple moving objects, what we already know illuminates the architecture of visual processing and offers promising directions for new discoveries.

"Perceiving the Affordances" is a personal history and intellectual autobiography of Eleanor Gibson, the groundbreaking research psychologist who was influential in the founding of the theory of perceptual development. It is also a biography of her husband, James J. Gibson, who was a major perceptual theorist and the founder of the ecologically-oriented theory of perception. This is the story of their lives together and how each came to make particular contributions. This book is of interest to people who study perception, perceptual development, infancy, developmental psychology, and the history of psychology.

Contents:
1. Introduction to perception 2. Theories and explanations of perception 3. Perceptual organisation 4. The development of visual perception 5. Individual, social and cultural variation in perceptual organisation 6. Study aids [Glossary Bibliography Index]