'Seeing' happens effortlessly and yet is endlessly complex. One of the most fascinating aspects of visual perception is its stability and constancy. As we shift our gaze or move about the world, the light projected onto the retinas is constantly changing. Yet the surrounding objects appear stable in their properties.
Psychologists have long been interested in constancies, exploring questions such as: How good is constancy? Is constancy a fact about how things look, or is it a product of our beliefs and judgments about how things look? How can the contents of visual experience be studied experimentally? However, philosophers have long been interested in characterizing visual experience and have become widely interested in the constancies more recently. As psychologists and philosophers have interacted, new questions have arisen: should we regard any departure from constancy as a failure of the visual system, or might it be a reasonable or adaptive response? In what circumstances is 'seeing' highly conditioned by cognitive factors such as background assumptions, and in what circumstances not?
Visual Experience explores size constancy and color constancy. It considers methodologies for studying conscious visual perception, efforts to describe visual experience in relation to constancy, what it means that constancy is not always perfect, and the conceptual resources needed for explaining visual experience. This interdisciplinary book is invaluable for both vision scientists and philosophers of mind.

To be a 'commonsense realist' is to hold that perceptual experience is (in general) an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects, and a source of direct knowledge of what such objects are like. Over the past few centuries this view has faced formidable challenges from epistemology, metaphysics, and, more recently, cognitive science. However, in recent years there has been renewed interest in it, due to new work on perceptual consciousness, objectivity, and causal understanding. This volume collects nineteen original essays by leading philosophers and psychologists on these topics. Questions addressed include: What are the commitments of commonsense realism? Does it entail any particular view of the nature of perceptual experience, or any particular view of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge? Should we think of commonsense realism as a view held by some philosophers, or is there a sense in which we are pre-theoretically committed to commonsense realism in virtue of the experience we enjoy or the concepts we use or the explanations we give? Is commonsense realism defensible, and if so how, in the face of the formidable criticism it faces? Specific issues addressed in the philosophical essays include the status of causal requirements on perception, the causal role of perceptual experience, and the relation between objective perception and causal thinking. The scientific essays present a range of perspectives on the development, phylogenetic and ontogenetic, of the human adult conception of perception.

The nature of attention is one of the oldest and most central problems in psychology. A huge amount of research has been produced on this subject in the last half century, especially on attention in the visual modality, but a general explanation has remained elusive. Many still view attention research as a field that is fundamentally fragmented. This book takes a different perspective and presents a unified theory of visual attention: the TVA model. The TVA model explains the many aspects of visual attention by just two mechanisms for selection of information: filtering and pigeonholing. These mechanisms are described in a set of simple equations, which allow TVA to mathematically model a large number of classical results in the attention literature. The theory explains psychological and neuroscientific findings by the same equations; TVA is a complete theory of visual attention, linking mind and brain. Aimed at advanced students and professional researchers, Principles of Visual Attention contains a detailed review of the most important research done on attention in vision, spanning cognitive psychology, brain imaging, patient studies, and recordings from single cells in the visual cortex. The book explains the TVA model and shows how it accounts for attentional effects observed across all the research areas described. Principles of Visual Attention offers a uniquely integrated view on a central topic in cognitive neuroscience.

True or False?
Most PowerPoint presentations are:

.compelling
.illuminating
.informative
.clear and to the point
Answer: False
Make a change following the principles of Stephen Kosslyn:

.a world authority on the visual brain
.a clear and engaging writer
Making PowerPoint presentations that are clear, compelling, memorable, and even enjoyable is not an obscure art. In this book, Stephen Kosslyn, a renowned cognitive neuroscientist, presents eight simple principles for constructing a presentation that takes advantage of the information modern science has discovered about perception, memory, and cognition. Using hundreds of images and sample slides, he shows the common mistakes many people make and the simple ways to fix them. For example, never use underlining to emphasize a word--the line will cut off the bottom of letters that have descending lines (such as p and g), which interferes with the brain's ability to recognize text. Other tips include why you should state your conclusion at the beginning of a presentation, when to use a line graph versus a bar graph, and how to use color correctly. By following Kosslyn's principles, anyone will be able to produce a presentation that works "

Adaptation phenomena provide striking examples of perceptual plasticity and offer valuable insight into the mechanisms of visual coding. The technique of psychophysical adaptation has aptly been termed the psychologist's microelectrode because of its usefulness in investigating the coding of sensory information in the human brain. Its broader relevance though is illustrated by the increasing use of adaptation to study more cognitive aspects of vision such as the mechanisms of face perception and the neural substrates of visual awareness. This book brings together a collection of studies from international researchers, which demonstrate the brain's remarkable capacity to adapt its representation of the visual world in response to changes in its environment. A major theme throughout is that adaptation at all stages of visual processing serves a functional role in the efficient representation of the prevailing visual environment. Information about the visual world is coded in the rate at which neurons fire. However, neurons can only respond over a certain range of firing rates. Adaptation of the way in which neurons code visual information tends to make optimal use of this limited response range. Though these principles are well established at the level of light adaptation in the retina, it is only relatively recently that researchers have started to look for analogous behaviour at the higher levels of the visual system. This book is the first to bring together evidence that adaptation in high-level vision, as at the lower levels, serves to fit the mind to the world.

The world of perception is multisensory. Even a simple task such as judging the position of a light in a dark room depends not only on vision but also on sensory signals about the position of our body in space. Likewise, how we experience food depends on sensory signals originating from the mouth, but also from nose signals, and even vision and hearing. However, traditional books on perception still discuss each of the "senses" separately. This book takes a different stance: it defines perception as intrinsically multisensory from the start and examines multisensory interactions as key process behind how we perceive our own body, control its movements, perceive and recognise objects, respond to edible objects, perceive space, and perceive time. In addition, the book discusses multisensory processing in synaesthesia, multisensory attention, and the role of multisensory processing in learning. As an introduction to multisensory perception, this book is essential reading for students in psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience at the advanced undergraduate to postgraduate levels. As the chapters address topics that are often left out of standard textbooks, this book will also serve as a useful reference for specialist perception scientists and clinicians. Finally, as a monograph understandable to the educated non-specialist this book will also be of interest to professionals who need to take into account multisensory processing in domains such as, for instance, physiotherapy, neurological rehabilitation, human-computer interfaces, marketing, or the design of products and services.

Colour has long been a source of fascination to both scientists and philosophers. In one sense, colours are in the mind of the beholder, in another sense they belong to the external world. Colours appear to lie on the boundary where we have divided the world into 'objective' and 'subjective' events. They represent, more than any other attribute of our visual experience, a place where both physical and mental properties are interwoven in an intimate and enigmatic way.

The last few decades have brought fascinating changes in the way that we think about 'colour' and the role 'colour' plays in our perceptual architecture. In Colour: Mind and the Physical World, leading scholars from cognitive psychology, philosophy, neurophysiology, and computational vision provide an overview of the contemporary developments in our understanding of colours and of the relationship between the 'mental' and the 'physical'. With each chapter followed by critical commentaries, the volume presents a lively and accessible picture of the intellectual traditions which have shaped research into colour perception.

Written in a non-technical style and accessible to an interdisciplinary audience, the book will provide an invaluable resource for researchers in colour perception and the cognitive sciences.

The topic of colour vision is one that integrates research from psychology, neuroscience, biology, opthalmology, physics, and genetics. How do we make sense of colour in the world, and how has such an ability evolved in humans? How are colours discriminated by the retina, and how does the brain interpret chromatic information? How can our genes influence the way in which we perceive colours? Why do some people have problems perceiving colours, and what occupational difficulties may they face? In what ways is colour vision altered by disease or toxins?

John Mollon, Joel Pokorny, and Ken Knoblauch are leading authorities on the perception of colour. Together they have brought together a distinguished list of contributors to provide an interdisciplinary review of the field. An historical introduction marks the bicentennial of Thomas Young's trichromatic theory and provides useful background for the newcomer to the topic of colour vision. Carefully edited and indexed, this book is aimed at students and researchers in the visual sciences, in perceptual psychology, and in sensory neuroscience. It will be a definitive text on colour perception for some years to come.

Getting the Blues: Vision and Cognition in the Middle Ages is an interdisciplinary study of medieval color. By integrating scientific and literary approaches, it revises our current understanding of how people in medieval Europe experienced color and what it meant to them. This book insists that the past perception of the world can be recovered by joining timeless universal constraints on human experience (discovered by science) to the unique cultural expressions of that experience (revealed by literature). The Middle Ages may evoke images of the multicolored stained glass of gothic cathedrals, the motley garb of minstrels, or the brilliant illuminations of manuscripts, yet such color often goes unnoticed in scholarly accounts of medieval literature. Getting the Blues restores some of the most important literary works of the Middle Ages to their full living color. Particular consideration is given to the twelfth-century Arthurian romances by Chretien de Troyes and the thirteenth-century Lancelot-Grail Cycle. Getting the Blues engages debates within the humanities and the sciences over universalist and relativist approaches to how humans see and name color. Scholars in the humanities often insist that color is a strictly cultural phenomenon, eschewing as irrelevant to the Middle Ages recent developments in cognitive science that show universal constraints on how people in all cultures see and name color. This book contributes to the recent cognitive turn in the humanities and sheds new light on some of the most frequent and meaningful cultural experiences in the Middle Ages: the perception, use, and naming of color.

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, Kimron 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.

This Element outlines the recent understanding of ensemble representations in perception in a holistic way aimed to engage the general audience, novel and expert alike. The Element highlights the ubiquitous nature of this summary process, paving the way for a discussion of the theoretical and cortical underpinnings, and why ensemble encoding should be considered a basic, inherently necessary component of human perception. Following an overview of the topic, including a brief history of the field, the Element introduces overarching themes and a corresponding outline of the present work.

This book collects both classic and contemporary articles in visual perception, providing the reader with an overview of key research ideas as they first appeared. The articles span a century of research: the earliest was published in 1894, the most recent in 1997. There are examples from each of the many disciplines that have contributed to our current understanding of vision, including experimental psychology, cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, and functional neuroimaging. The topics include theoretical perspectives, early vision, perceptual organization and constancy, object and spatial vision, and visual attention and awareness. A brief introduction to each article by the editor provides an intellectual context and pointers to subsequent developments. Suggestions for further reading and discussion questions provide a framework for students to strengthen their understanding of different topics.
This book will be an excellent source of supplementary readings in an advanced undergraduate or graduate course in vision, or a stand-alone text for an in-depth graduate seminar. Professionals in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, visual science, and cognitive science will find this a valuable addition to their personal libraries.

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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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This two-volume set was developed to help researchers and practitioners select measures to be used in the evaluation of human/machine systems. It can also be used to supplement classes at both the undergraduate and graduate courses in ergonomics, experimental psychology, human factors, human performance, measurement, and system test and evaluation. Volume 1 of the handbook begins with an overview of the steps involved in developing a test to measure human performance, workload, and/or situational awareness. This is followed by a definition of human performance and a review of human performance measures. Situational Awareness is similarly treated in a subsequent chapter. Volume 2 presents a definition of workload and a review of workload measures. Provides a short engineering tutorial on experimental design Offers readily accessible information on human performance, workload, and situational awareness (SA) measures Presents general description of the measure Covers data collection, reduction, and analysis requirement Details out the strengths and limitations or restrictions of each measure, including any known proprietary rights or restrictions, as well as validity and reliability data

Larry M. Jorgensen provides a systematic reappraisal of Leibniz's philosophy of mind, revealing the full metaphysical background that allowed Leibniz to see farther than most of his contemporaries. In recent philosophy much effort has been put into discovering a naturalized theory of mind. Leibniz's efforts to reach a similar goal three hundred years earlier offer a critical stance from which we can assess our own theories. But while the goals might be similar, the content of Leibniz's theory significantly diverges from that of today's thought. Perhaps surprisingly, Leibniz's theological commitments yielded a thoroughgoing naturalizing methodology: the properties of an object are explicable in terms of the object's nature. Larry M. Jorgensen shows how this methodology led Leibniz to a fully natural theory of mind.

In this two volume festschrift, contributors explore the theoretical developments (Volume I) and applications (Volume II) in traditional cognitive psychology domains, and model other areas of human performance that benefit from rigorous mathematical approaches. It brings together former classmates, students and colleagues of Dr. James T. Townsend, a pioneering researcher in the field since the early 1960s, to provide a current overview of mathematical modeling in psychology. Townsend's research critically emphasized a need for rigor in the practice of cognitive modeling, and for providing mathematical definition and structure to ill-defined psychological topics. The research captured demonstrates how the interplay of theory and application, bridged by rigorous mathematics, can move cognitive modeling forward.

Our species is misnamed. Though sapiens defines human beings as "wise" what humans do especially well is to prospect the future. We are homo prospectus. In this book, Martin E. P. Seligman, Peter Railton, Roy F. Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada argue it is anticipating and evaluating future possibilities for the guidance of thought and action that is the cornerstone of human success. Much of the history of psychology has been dominated by a framework in which people's behavior is driven by past history (memory) and present circumstances (perception and motivation). Homo Prospectus reassesses this idea, pushing focus to the future front and center and opening discussion of a new field of Psychology and Neuroscience. The authors delve into four modes in which prospection operates: the implicit mind, deliberate thought, mind-wandering, and collective (social) imagination. They then explore prospection's role in some of life's most enduring questions: Why do people think about the future? Do we have free will? What is the nature of intuition, and how might it function in ethics? How does emotion function in human psychology? Is there a common causal process in different psychopathologies? Does our creativity change with age? In this remarkable convergence of research in philosophy, statistics, decision theory, psychology, and neuroscience, Homo Prospectus shows how human prospection fundamentally reshapes our understanding of key cognitive processes, thereby improving individual and social functioning. It aims to galvanize interest in this new science from scholars in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, as well as an educated public curious about what makes humanity what it is.

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.

Stephen Kern writes about the sweeping changes in technology and culture between 1880 and World War I that created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space. To mark the bookUs twentieth anniversary, Kern provides an illuminating new preface about the breakthrough in interpretive approach that has made this a seminal work in interdisciplinary studies.

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.

In this two volume festschrift, contributors explore the theoretical developments (Volume I) and applications (Volume II) in traditional cognitive psychology domains, and model other areas of human performance that benefit from rigorous mathematical approaches. It brings together former classmates, students and colleagues of Dr. James T. Townsend, a pioneering researcher in the field since the early 1960s, to provide a current overview of mathematical modeling in psychology. Townsend's research critically emphasized a need for rigor in the practice of cognitive modeling, and for providing mathematical definition and structure to ill-defined psychological topics. The research captured demonstrates how the interplay of theory and application, bridged by rigorous mathematics, can move cognitive modeling forward.

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.

In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of mental representational: perception. Focusing on the functions and capacities of perceptual states, Burge accounts for their representational content and structure, and develops a formal semantics for them. The discussion explains the role of iconic format in the structure. It also situates the accounts of content, structure, and semantics within scientific explanations of perceptual-state formation, emphasizing formation of perceptual categorization. In the book's second half, Burge discusses what a perceptual system is. Exploration of relations between perception and other primitive capacities-conation, attention, memory, anticipation, affect, learning, and imagining-helps distinguish perceiving, with its associated capacities, from thinking, with its associated capacities. Drawing mainly on vision science, not introspection, Perception: First Form of Mind is a rigorous, agenda-setting work in philosophy of perception and philosophy of science.

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 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.