What can art tell us about how the brain works? And what can the brain tell us about how we perceive and create art? Humans have created visual art throughout history and its significance has been an endless source of fascination and debate. Visual art is a product of the human brain, but is art so complex and sophisticated that brain function and evolution are not relevant to our understanding? This book explores the links between visual art and the brain by examining a broad range of issues including: the impact of eye and brain disorders on artistic output; the relevance of Darwinian principles to aesthetics; and the constraints imposed by brain processes on the perception of space, motion and colour in art. Arguments and theories are presented in an accessible manner and general principles are illustrated with specific art examples, helping students to apply their knowledge to new artworks.

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.

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

This book describes and proposes an unusual integrative approach to human perception that qualifies as both an ecological and a phenomenological approach at the same time. Thomas Natsoulas shows us how our consciousness - in three of six senses of the word that the book identifies - is involved in our activity of perceiving the one and only world that exists, which includes oneself as a proper part of it, and that all of us share together with the rest of life on earth. He makes the case that our stream of consciousness - in the original Jamesian sense minus his mental/physical dualism - provides us with firsthand contact with the world, as opposed to our having such contact instead with theorist-posited items such as inner mental representations, internal pictures, or sense-image models, pure figments and virtual objects, none of which can have effects on our sensory receptors.

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.

Foundations of Sensation and Perception offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the science of sensation and perception. It covers all the human senses and answers many questions, such as why movies are so convincing, how ventriloquism works, why things sound different as you get older and why you may feel ill in an aircraft or sea vessel. Full of illustrations and graphs that bring concepts to life, the textbook covers vision, hearing, balance, touch, pain, smell and taste. It discusses each sensory system through its fundamental neuroscience, major perceptual qualities and underlying coding principles. Each chapter includes reflective questions, key terms and information boxes and chapter summaries. Each chapter ends with a tutorial section which introduces more advanced areas of study in an accessible way (including measurement of light and Fourier analysis) as well as topics outside of the mainstream of sensation (including music perception, colour deficiencies and phantom limbs). The fourth edition of this bestselling textbook includes an extensive update of the text to reflect the latest research, a greater focus on balance and the body senses and a major reorganisation of the chapters for ease of use. It will be an invaluable resource for a wide range of undergraduate students in psychology, neuroscience and related disciplines.

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.

How does experience change the way we perceive the world? This Element explores the interaction between perception and experience by studying perceptual experts, people who specialize in recognizing objects such as birds, automobiles, dogs. It proposes perceptual expertise promotes a downward shift in object recognition where experts recognize objects in their domain of expertise at a more specific level than novices. To support this claim, it examines the recognition abilities and brain mechanisms of real-world experts. It discusses the acquisition of expertise by tracing the cognitive and neural changes that occur as a novice becomes an expert through training and experience. Next, it looks "under the hood" of expertise and examines the perceptual features that experts bring to bear to facilitate their fast, accurate, and specific recognition. The final section considers the future of human expertise as deep learning models and artificial intelligence compete with human experts in medical diagnosis.

Advances in our understanding of the ways in which people obtain information about the world through their hand and skin sense have many practical implications for work with sensorily impaired children and adults. This volume, first published in 1982, draws together the threads of numerous studies to present an overview of knowledge about tactual-haptic perception. It will be a valuable reference text for a wide variety of psychologists and other students of perception as well as for those involved in the education of the blind and deaf. Tactual graphics, the perception of speech via the skin and the written word via Braille, the production and perception of drawings by the blind, and the social significance of touch are among the topics addressed by the chapter authors.

Using a concise question and answer format, The Perception of Time: Your Questions Answered examines basic temporal processes and the ways in which our perception of time can be altered. Divided into three parts, the book provides a contemporary overview of the study of the temporal mind. It begins by introducing the fundamental processes of time perception; how it can be measured, how it can be hindered, and to what extent it can be enhanced. It proceeds to explain how cognitive and psychological disorders, such as schizophrenia, ADHD, and anxiety can be linked to temporal dysfunction, and answers common questions that face us all: why does time seem to go faster as we age? How do our emotions affect our perception of time? How does our relationship with time differ from others? Providing comprehensive answers to the most pertinent questions of time perception, this book is an ideal companion for advanced students and researchers interested in the psychology of time.

Whether it was the demands of life, leisure, or a combination of both that forced our hands, we have developed a myriad of artifacts--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, by contrast, argues that what it is to be a picture does not fundamentally concern how such representations can be perceived. What matters is not how we perceive representations but how they relate to one another. 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. Kulvicki undermines the claim that pictures are essentially visual by showing how many kinds of non-visual representations, including audio recordings and tactile line drawings, are genuinely pictorial. Part Two shows that the structural account of depiction can help to explain why pictures seem so perceptually special, rather than taking that fact for granted. Based on these results, Part Three provides a new account of pictorial realism.

Originally published in 1989. In this interdisciplinary study, Dr Levin offers an account of personal growth and self-fulfilment based on the development of our capacity for listening. This book should be of interest to advanced students of critical theory, psychology, cultural studies, ethics, continental philosophy, ontology, metaphysics.

The scientific story of first impressions--and why the snap character judgments we make from faces are irresistible but usually incorrect We make up our minds about others after seeing their faces for a fraction of a second--and these snap judgments predict all kinds of important decisions. For example, politicians who simply look more competent are more likely to win elections. Yet the character judgments we make from faces are as inaccurate as they are irresistible; in most situations, we would guess more accurately if we ignored faces. So why do we put so much stock in these widely shared impressions? What is their purpose if they are completely unreliable? In this book, Alexander Todorov, one of the world's leading researchers on the subject, answers these questions as he tells the story of the modern science of first impressions. Drawing on psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, computer science, and other fields, this accessible and richly illustrated book describes cutting-edge research and puts it in the context of the history of efforts to read personality from faces. Todorov describes how we have evolved the ability to read basic social signals and momentary emotional states from faces, using a network of brain regions dedicated to the processing of faces. Yet contrary to the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of physiognomy and even some of today's psychologists, faces don't provide us a map to the personalities of others. Rather, the impressions we draw from faces reveal a map of our own biases and stereotypes. A fascinating scientific account of first impressions, Face Value explains why we pay so much attention to faces, why they lead us astray, and what our judgments actually tell us.

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.

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.

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.

City Living is about urban spaces, urban dwellers, and how these spaces and people make, shape, and change one another. More people live in cities than ever before: more than 50% of the earth's people are urban dwellers. As downtown cores gentrify and globalize, they are becoming more diverse than ever, along lines of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and age. Meanwhile, we are in the early stages of what seems sure to be a period of intense civil unrest. During such periods, cities generally become the primary sites where tensions and resistance are concentrated, negotiated, and performed. For all of these reasons, understanding cities and contemporary city living is pressing and exciting from almost any disciplinary and political perspective. Quill R Kukla offers the first systematic philosophical investigation of the nature of city life and city dwellers. The book draws on empirical and ethnographic work in geography, anthropology, urban planning, and several other disciplines in order to explore the impact that cities have on their dwellers and that dwellers have on their cities. It begins with a philosophical exploration of spatially embodied agency and of the specific forms of agency and spatiality that are distinctive of urban life. It explores how gentrification is enacted and experienced at the level of embodied agency, arguing that gentrifying spaces are contested territories that shape and are shaped by their dwellers. The book then moves to an exploration of repurposed cities, which are cities materially designed to support one sociopolitical order, but in which that order collapsed, leaving new dwellers to use the space in new ways. Through detailed original ethnography of the repurposed cities of Berlin and Johannesburg, Kukla makes the case that in repurposed cities, we can see vividly how material spaces shape and constrain the agency and experience of dwellers, while dwellers creatively shape the spaces they inhabit in accordance with their needs. The book concludes with a reconsideration of the right to the city, asking what would be involved in creating a city that enabled the agency and flourishing of all its diverse inhabitants.

This anthology translates eighteen papers by Italian philosopher and experimental psychologist Paolo Bozzi (1930-2003), bringing his distinctive and influential ideas to an English-speaking audience for the first time. The papers cover a range of methodological and experimental questions concerning the phenomenology of perception and their theoretical implications, with each one followed by commentary from leading international experts. In his laboratory work, Bozzi investigated visual and auditory perception, such as our responses to pendular motion and bodies in freefall, afterimages, transparency effects, and grouping effects in dot lattices and among sounds (musical notes). Reflecting on the results of his enquiries against the background of traditional approaches to experimentation in these fields, Bozzi took a unique realist stance that challenges accepted approaches to perception, arguing that experimental phenomenology is neither a science of the perceptual process nor a science of the appearances; it is a science of how things are. The writings collected here offer an important resource for psychologists of perception and philosophers, as well as for researchers in cognitive science.

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.

This anthology translates eighteen papers by Italian philosopher and experimental psychologist Paolo Bozzi (1930-2003), bringing his distinctive and influential ideas to an English-speaking audience for the first time. The papers cover a range of methodological and experimental questions concerning the phenomenology of perception and their theoretical implications, with each one followed by commentary from leading international experts. In his laboratory work, Bozzi investigated visual and auditory perception, such as our responses to pendular motion and bodies in freefall, afterimages, transparency effects, and grouping effects in dot lattices and among sounds (musical notes). Reflecting on the results of his enquiries against the background of traditional approaches to experimentation in these fields, Bozzi took a unique realist stance that challenges accepted approaches to perception, arguing that experimental phenomenology is neither a science of the perceptual process nor a science of the appearances; it is a science of how things are. The writings collected here offer an important resource for psychologists of perception and philosophers, as well as for researchers in cognitive science.

Why do people attach importance to the wordless language we call music? Music Cognition: The Basics considers the role of our cognitive functions, such as perception, memory, attention, and expectation in perceiving, making, and appreciating music.

In this volume, Henkjan Honing explores the active role these functions play in how music makes us feel; exhilarated, soothed, or inspired. Grounded in the latest research in areas of psychology, biology, and cognitive neuroscience, and with clear examples throughout, this book concentrates on underappreciated musical skills such as sense of rhythm, beat induction, and relative pitch, that make people intrinsically musical creatures—supporting the conviction that all humans have a unique, instinctive attraction to music.

The scope of the topics discussed ranges from the ability of newborns to perceive a beat, to the unexpected musical expertise of ordinary listeners. It is a must read for anyone studying the psychology of music, auditory perception, or simply interested in why we enjoy music the way we do.

Table of Contents

Part 1: De do do do, de da da da | The tone of speech and music 1. First Listening Experiences 2. The Illiterate Listener Part 2: Ooh-ooh-ooh | The Magic of Music 3. Music as Mystery 4. Music as Language 5. Music as Sound Part 3: Hmmm . . . | Music and Musicality 6. We’re Musical Creatures 7. Measuring the Beat 8. Do You Recognize this Melody?Part 4: Tá-ta-ta-tá-ta | Music as Cognition 9. The Secret of the "Loud Rest" 10. The Secret of the Details 11. The Secret, Mapped Out Part 5: Aha! | Music in Our Minds 12. The Musical Listener 13. Listening and Learning 14. Encore

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Ways of seeing is a book about human vision. It results from the collaboration between a world famous cognitive neuroscientist and an eminent philosopher. In the past forty years, cognitive neuroscience has made many startling discoveries about the human brain, and about the human visual system in particular. This book brings many recent empirical findings, from electrophysiological recordings in animals, the neuropsychological examination of human patients, psychophysics, and developmental cognitive psychology, to bear on questions traditionally addressed by philosophers. What is the meaning of the English verb 'to see'? How does visual perception yield knowledge of the world? How does visual perception relate to thought? What is the role of conscious visual experience in visually guided actions? How does seeing actions relate to seeing objects? In the process the book provides a new assessment of the 'two visual systems' hypothesis, according to which the human visual system comprises two anatomical pathways with separable visual functions. The first truly interdisciplinary book about human vision, it will be of interest to students and researchers in many areas of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind.

The fast-growing interdisciplinary research area of 'language and space' investigates how language and representations of space are linked in information processing systems, like the brain. This is the first book in a new series at the forefront of research in the interfaces between brain, perception, and language. When we use directions in language, such as 'under the tree', how are these directions represented in our minds before we even start speaking, and how are directions expressed in different languages? Considering the way in which language and space are linked has consequences for theories on word meaning (linguistics and philosophy), for the construction of language-to-space interfaces (computer science), for our comprehension of how people use language in different contexts and cultures (psychology and anthropology), and for the way in which we can distinguish between normal and subnormal cognitive processing (neuroscience).

How can we understand a system as intricate as the human brain? Microcosms of the brain presents a bold new approach. It argues that the key to understanding brain function lies in the sensorimotor systems - those that gather sensory data such as light and sound, and use them to control action, steering the eyes, head, or limbs. The book shows how these subsystems can serve as microcosms of the brain - small enough to be analyzed but substantial enough to reveal general principles of brain function. By studying these simple systems and simulating them on computers, we can get some answers to the bigger questions about the brain.

In ten chapters Douglas Tweed explores ten concepts that may help form a basis for the computerized neuroscience of the future: optimization, computation, complexity, learning, dynamics, interfaces, loops, degrees of freedom, information, and inference. He explains these concepts in simple, non-mathematical language, and shows how they can bring some order to our view of the human brain.

Written to be accessible to lay readers as well as students and researchers in the cognitive sciences, this is a book that could dramatically change the way we explore the human mind.

The evocation of narrative as a way to understand the content of consciousness, including memory, autobiography, self, and imagination, has sparked truly interdisciplinary work among psychologists, philosophers, and literary critics. Even neuroscientists have taken an interest in the stories people create to understand themselves, their past, and the world around them. The research presented in this volume should appeal to researchers enmeshed in these problems, as well as the general reader with an interest in the philosophical problem of what consciousness is and how it functions in the everyday world.