Structural information theory is a coherent theory about the way the human visual system organises a raw visual stimulus into objects and object parts. To humans, a visual stimulus usually has one clear interpretation even though, in theory, any stimulus can be interpreted in numerous ways. To explain this, the theory focuses on the nature of perceptual interpretations rather than on underlying process mechanisms and adopts the simplicity principle which promotes efficiency of internal resources rather than the likelihood principle which promotes veridicality in the external world. This theoretically underpinned starting point gives rise to quantitative models and verifiable predictions for many visual phenomena, including amodal completion, subjective contours, transparency, brightness contrast, brightness assimilation and neon illusions. It also explains phenomena such as induced temporal order, temporal context effects and hierarchical dominance effects, and extends to evaluative pattern qualities such as distinctiveness, interestingness and beauty.

Synaesthesia is a fascinating cognitive phenomenon where one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. For example, synaesthetes might perceive colours when listening to music, or tastes in the mouth when reading words. This book provides an insight into the idiosyncratic nature of synaesthesia by exploring its relationships with other dimensions of individual differences. Many characteristics of linguistic-colour synaesthetes are covered including personality, temperament, intelligence, creativity, emotionality, attention, memory, imagination, colour perception, body lateralization and gender. Aleksandra Maria Rogowska proposes that linguistic-colour synaesthesia can be considered as an abstract form of a continuous variable in the broader context of cross- and intra-modal associations. There has been a resurgence of interest in synaesthesia and this book will appeal to students and scientists of psychology, cognitive science and social science, and to those who are fascinated by unusual states of mind.

Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses is a highly original and comprehensive overview of the anthropology and sociology of the body and the senses. Discussing each sense in turn - seeing, hearing, touch, smell, and taste - Le Breton has written a truly monumental work, vast in scope and deeply engaging in style. Among other pioneering moves, he gives equal attention to light and darkness, sound and silence, and his disputation of taste explores aspects of disgust and revulsion. Part phenomenological, part historical, this is above all a cultural account of perception, which returns the body and the senses to the center of social life. Le Breton is the leading authority on the anthropology of the body and the senses in French academia. With a repute comparable to the late Pierre Bourdieu, his 30+ books have been translated into numerous languages. This is the first of his works to be made available in English. This sensuously nuanced translation of La Saveur du monde is accompanied by a spicy preface from series editor David Howes, who introduces Le Breton's work to an English-speaking audience and highlights its implications for the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and the cross-disciplinary field of sensory studies.

Lectures on Perception: An Ecological Perspective addresses the generic principles by which each and every kind of life form-from single celled organisms (e.g., difflugia) to multi-celled organisms (e.g., primates)-perceives the circumstances of their living so that they can behave adaptively. It focuses on the fundamental ability that relates each and every organism to its surroundings, namely, the ability to perceive things in the sense of how to get about among them and what to do, or not to do, with them. The book's core thesis breaks from the conventional interpretation of perception as a form of abduction based on innate hypotheses and acquired knowledge, and from the historical scientific focus on the perceptual abilities of animals, most especially those abilities ascribed to humankind. Specifically, it advances the thesis of perception as a matter of laws and principles at nature's ecological scale, and gives equal theoretical consideration to the perceptual achievements of all of the classically defined 'kingdoms' of organisms-Archaea, Bacteria, Protoctista, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia.

Perceptual organization is the neuro-cognitive process that enables us to perceive scenes as structured wholes consisting of objects arranged in space. Simplicity in Vision explores the intriguing idea that these perceived wholes are given by the simplest organizations of the scenes. Peter A. van der Helm presents a truly multidisciplinary approach to answer fundamental questions such as: Are simplest organizations sufficiently reliable to guide our actions? What is the nature of the regularities that are exploited to arrive at simplest organizations? To account for the high combinatorial capacity and speed of the perceptual organization process, he proposes transparallel processing by hyperstrings. This special form of distributed processing not only gives classical computers the extraordinary computing power that seemed reserved for quantum computers, but also explains how neuronal synchronization relates to flexible self-organizing cognitive architecture in between the relatively rigid level of neurons and the still elusive level of consciousness.

Originally published in 1927 as part of the Cambridge Psychological Library, this book emphasizes the importance of the biological foundations of psychology, with perception being the bridge between nerve processes and consciousness. Parsons, an ophthalmic surgeon, views problems of perception as being both biological and psychological issues in the conscious and behavioural lives of an animal. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the overlap between psychological and biological processes.

First published in 1924 as the second edition of a 1915 original, and part of the Cambridge Psychological Library, this book examines the chief theories on colour vision in the light of available facts at the time of publication. In the first section of the book, Parsons discusses the physical, anatomical and psychological bases of colour vision in a variety of eyes. The second part analyses colour blindness. The third and final segment evaluates the various theories of colour vision. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of science or colour vision.

Richard Gregory was one of the major scientific thinkers of our time. Originally published in 1986, here he presents essays on the rich subject of perception. How we experience colours, shapes, sounds, touches, tickles, tastes and smells is a mysterious and rich inquiry. Wonderful as these sensations are, though, he argues that perception becomes really interesting when we consider how objects are identified and located in space and time as things we interact with, using our intelligence to understand them. Gregory's essays convey the crucial importance of the major scientists and their achievements in the study of perception; but they also show us how much we can learn from our surroundings, our language, our times, our successes and our failures. Why are we so often fooled, in scientific as well as everyday life?

Perception is about the reception, selection, acquisition, transformation and organization of sensory information. This book, originally published in 1976, discusses a number of aspects of human perception within a theoretical framework in which man is considered as a processor of information. The main emphasis is on visual perception with particular reference to looking and pattern recognition; selective listening and speech recognition are also discussed.

The No. 1 Sunday Times and internationally bestselling account of life as a child with autism, now a documentary film Winner of Best Documentary and Best Sound in the British Independent Film Awards 2021. 'It will stretch your vision of what it is to be human' Andrew Solomon, The Times What is it like to have autism? How can we know what a person - especially a child - with autism is thinking and feeling? This groundbreaking book, written by Naoki Higashida when he was only thirteen, provides some answers. Severely autistic and non-verbal, Naoki learnt to communicate by using a 'cardboard keyboard' - and what he has to say gives a rare insight into an autistically-wired mind. He explains behaviour he's aware can be baffling such as why he likes to jump and why some people with autism dislike being touched; he describes how he perceives and navigates the world, sharing his thoughts and feelings about time, life, beauty and nature; and he offers an unforgettable short story. Proving that people with autism do not lack imagination, humour or empathy, THE REASON I JUMP made a major impact on its publication in English. Widely praised, it was an immediate No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller as well as a New York Times bestseller and has since been published in over thirty languages. In 2020, a documentary film based on the book received its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Jerry Rothwell, produced by Jeremy Dear, Stevie Lee and Al Morrow, and funded by Vulcan Productions and the British Film Institute, it won the festival's Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary, then further awards at the Vancouver, Denver and Valladolid International Film Festivals before its global release in 2021. The book includes eleven original illustrations inspired by Naoki's words, by the artistic duo Kai and Sunny.

Structural information theory is a coherent theory about the way the human visual system organises a raw visual stimulus into objects and object parts. To humans, a visual stimulus usually has one clear interpretation even though, in theory, any stimulus can be interpreted in numerous ways. To explain this, the theory focuses on the nature of perceptual interpretations rather than on underlying process mechanisms and adopts the simplicity principle which promotes efficiency of internal resources rather than the likelihood principle which promotes veridicality in the external world. This theoretically underpinned starting point gives rise to quantitative models and verifiable predictions for many visual phenomena, including amodal completion, subjective contours, transparency, brightness contrast, brightness assimilation and neon illusions. It also explains phenomena such as induced temporal order, temporal context effects and hierarchical dominance effects, and extends to evaluative pattern qualities such as distinctiveness, interestingness and beauty.

Musical Performance covers many aspects like Musical Acoustics, Music Psychology, or motor and prosodic actions. It deals with basic concepts of the origin or music and its evolution, ranges over neurocognitive foundations, and covers computational, technological, or simulation solutions. This volume gives an overview about current research in the foundation of musical performance studies on all these levels. Recent concepts of synchronized systems, evolutionary concepts, basic understanding of performance as Gestalt patterns, theories of chill as performance goals or historical aspects are covered. The neurocognitive basis of motor action in terms of music, musical syntax, as well as therapeutic aspects are discussed. State-of-the-art applications in performance realizations, like virtual room acoustics, virtual musicians, new concepts of real-time physical modeling using complex performance data as input or sensor and gesture studies with soft- and hardware solutions are presented. So although the field is still much larger, this volume presents current trends in terms of understanding, implementing, and perceiving performance.

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.

This volumes collects new essays by top philosophers, all on the theme of perception while also making connections between perception and other philosophical areas like epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of action. Perception has become a major area of philosophical interest, with a number of important collections and monographs appearing recently. This may partly be due to the growing use of empirical and neuroscientific data by philosophers of mind. The contributors in this volume represent the high quality of current scholars (many OUP authors) working in the area, among them Jesse Prinz, Fred Dretske, Susanna Siegel, and Benj Hellie. Some of the questions they raise include, What is the object of perception? How can perception give rise to knowledge? What is the link between perception and action? Between perception and belief? How do we perceive colors? What do animals perceive? How do empirical findings inform traditional philosophical thinking about perception? Does perception represent the world? What are the properties that are represented in perception? Nanay also provides a detailed introduction surveying the state of the field. This volume contains new work by some of the top figures in the field on a broad topic of interest.

The psychologist Edmund Parish makes a valuable contribution to the study of the psychology of perception as well as introducing a theory of insanity in this 1897 work. The author tells the reader that it grew out of an examination of the German 'International Census of Waking Hallucinations in the Sane', the results of which he had analysed. Rather than merely translating the German original, Parish has added new information and considered criticism of his own previous work. The book is a sustained effort to define 'the common organic principle which, under whatever diversity of conditions, underlies alike normal and fallacious perception', by incorporating the most recent psychological and neurological research. Parish is especially interested in casting light on the waking hallucinations of healthy persons, as he regards this phenomenon as having been largely ignored by previous research.

The study of emotional expressions has a long tradition in psychology. Although research in this domain has extensively studied the social context factors that influence the expresser's facial display, the perceiver was considered passive. This 2007 book focuses on more recent developments that show that the perceiver is also subject to the same social rules and norms that guide the expresser's behavior and that knowledge of relevant emotion norms can influence how emotional expressions shown by members of different groups are perceived and interpreted. Factors such as ethnic-group membership, gender and relative status all influence not only emotional expressions but also the interpretation of emotional expressions shown by members of different groups. Specifically, the research presented asks the question of whether and why the same expressions shown by men or women, members of different ethnic groups, or individuals high and low in status are interpreted differently.

Perceptual Constancy examines a group of long-standing problems in the field of perception and provides a review of the fundamentals of the problems and their solutions. Experts in several different fields - including computational vision, physiology, neuropsychology, psychophysics and comparative psychology - present their approaches to one of the fundamental problems of perception: how does the brain extract a stable world from an ever-changing retinal input? How do we achieve color constancy despite changes in the wavelength content of daylight? How do we recognize objects from different viewpoints? And how do we know the sizes of those objects? The volume is divided into three sections, each of which addresses developmental, clinical and comparative issues, psychophysics, and physiology.

Every time you consult a calendar or clock, other people are thinking for you. Most users of these tools only know how to interpret the representations of time these objects provide, not the logics behind the representations. Those logics were others' ideas. This book looks at how the objects we use to think about time shape our thoughts. Such objects empower us to think about time certain ways, but they also contain hidden assumptions about time that deflect our awareness away from the complicated rhythms of our lives and our world. Because time ties together so many aspects of our lives, this book is able to explore the nexus of objects, cognition, culture, and even biology, and to do so in relationship to

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.

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. She then introduces a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. She then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kinds of properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. She goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. Siegel's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision.

If a man born blind were to gain his sight in later life would he be able to identify the objects he saw around him? Would he recognise a cube and a globe on the basis of his earlier tactile experiences alone? This was William Molyneux's famous question to John Locke and it was much discussed by English and French empiricists in the eighteenth century as part of the controversy over innatism and abstract ideas. Dr Morgan examines the whole history of this debate: Locke's own (negative) answer to the question, the contributions of Berkeley, Condillac, Diderot and Voltaire and the factual accounts of early cataract operations and modern laboratory studies. He shows how this debate is involved in the development and eventual separation of philosophy and experimental psychology after the eighteenth century and considers why the original question is effectively still unanswered. This is one problem-area with its intricate cluster of connected conceptual and technical difficulties which suggests the need for some reunion or at least collaboration between the two subjects.

In recent years, Bayesian probability theory has emerged not only as a powerful tool for building computational theories of vision, but also as a general paradigm for studying human visual perception. The Bayesian approach provides new and powerful metaphors for conceptualizing visual perception, suggests novel questions to ask about perceptual processing, and provides the means to formalize theories of perception that make testable predictions about human perceptual performance. This book provides an introduction to and critical analysis of the Bayesian paradigm. Chapters by leading researchers in computational theory and experimental visual science introduce new theoretical frameworks for building perceptual theories, discuss the implications of the Bayesian paradigm for psychophysical studies of human perception, and describe specific applications of the approach. The editors have created a critical dialogue of ideas through the authors' commentaries on each others' chapters, conveying to the reader a unique appreciation for the issues and ideas raised in the book.

This accessible book provides a foundational understanding of the science of deception and lie detection. Focusing on core issues for the field, it discusses classic and current psychological research into lying as well as theoretical approaches to understanding human lie detection. The book explores engaging questions around how people lie, how people make decisions about believing others, and how we can detect deception. Each chapter is clearly structured to support students of all levels by summarising content, presenting key research and systematically evaluating findings. Chapters explore topics including some of the most promising current lie detection techniques, how and why people lie, how lying develops in children, and whether unconscious thinking can boost lie detection accuracy. Providing an overview of key issues in deception, this book will be of great interest to students and lecturers in the field of deception and lie detection, as well as anyone generally interested in this fascinating field of research.

Virtual reality is a perceptual experience, achieved using technology. Anyone wishing to develop virtual reality should understand the human perceptual processes with which the technology seeks to interact and control. The book presents state-of-the-art reviews of the current understanding of these human perceptual processes and the implications for virtual reality. It reports research which has tried to make the technology capable of delivering the required perceptual experience, comprising a basis for future virtual reality research, so as to achieve the optimum development of the field. It is intended to be of use to anyone who is involved with the creation of a virtual reality experience.

The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we could never see such evils again-that we would stand up and fight. But something deep in the human psyche-deeper than prejudice itself-leads people to persecute the other: dehumanization, or the human propensity to think of others as less than human. An award-winning author and philosopher, Smith takes an unflinching look at the mechanisms of the mind that encourage us to see someone as less than human. There is something peculiar and horrifying in human psychology that makes us vulnerable to thinking of whole groups of people as subhuman creatures. When governments or other groups stand to gain by exploiting this innate propensity, and know just how to manipulate words and images to trigger it, there is no limit to the violence and hatred that can result. Drawing on numerous historical and contemporary cases and recent psychological research, On Inhumanity is the first accessible guide to the phenomenon of dehumanization. Smith walks readers through the psychology of dehumanization, revealing its underlying role in both notorious and lesser-known episodes of violence from history and current events. In particular, he considers the uncomfortable kinship between racism and dehumanization, where beliefs involving race are so often precursors to dehumanization and the horrors that flow from it. On Inhumanity is bracing and vital reading in a world lurching towards authoritarian political regimes, resurgent white nationalism, refugee crises that breed nativist hostility, and fast-spreading racist rhetoric. The book will open your eyes to the pervasive dangers of dehumanization and the prejudices that can too easily take root within us, and resist them before they spread into the wider world.