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.

Gestalt psychology, neurophysiology and the psychology of perception have tried to answer the question of whether we see forms as a whole or as the sum of their parts, why we perceive things as they are and not as they appear on the retina, which is in fact changed in perspective and in size, and which visual cortical areas and which neurons react to which phenomena. But the most important question for the author is which additional information the thing that is seen conveys. How do we tell the difference between a cheerful and a gloomy face? Why do we see that a bud will open shortly? Why do we find some phenomena to be dangerous and others to be desirable? These question have not yet been investigated in a systematic and scientific way, although they are of vital importance to our behaviour. Jürgen Weber brings together the results of various disciplines and his own research and experience as a sculptor and painter with a scientific background and develops a new theory of perception of form.

The only textbook to frame cognitive psychology in the context of our everyday lives. Our lives are governed by cognitive processes, whether we are searching for a face in a crowd, driving to work, or learning a second language. Cognition in the Real World brings together expert contributors who explain the processes underlying everyday behaviours. It is set apart from traditional textbooks by being organised by behaviours we are exposed to every day-such as drawing a picture, learning your way around a new city, or deciding how to invest your money. Such activities naturally involve a variety of cognitive functions; by considering these functions in an integrated way, the text provides a complete picture of how behaviours work together, rather than separately. Drawing upon important insights from areas such as developmental psychology and neuroscience, Cognition in the Real World demonstrates how cognitive psychology fits with the broader subjects around it, rather than treating it as an independent topic. With a strong foundation in cognitive theory, framed by an original and engaging real-world approach, the text makes the topics of cognition come alive.

How do we sort the objects, people, events, and ideas in the world into their proper categories so that we may experience and interact with them? This fundamental question about human--and animal--perception and cognition is the subject of Categorical Perception, a comprehensive survey of a wide range of important research findings on the subject. The volume brings together all known examples of categorical perception, from research on humans and animals, infants and adults, in all the sense modalities: hearing, seeing, and touch. The perceptual findings are then interpreted in terms of the available cognitive and neuroscientific theories of how categorical perception is accomplished by the brain. Research on elementary perceptual and psychophysical categories is then compared with work on higher order categories such as objects, patterns, and abstract concepts. The book proceeds to an integrative view of categorization in general by exploring the most thoroughly investigated case of categorical perception--speech perception.

The attempt to study language as part of cognitive science is apparently being thwarted by the lack of contact and inferential links between current theoretical paradigms. This dynamic collection provides an overview of the relationship between linguistic form and interpretation as exemplified by the most influential of these paradigms - the current Chomskian Government and Binding paradigm, the conflicting Situation Semantics paradigm, the Davidsonian programme and, finally, the new relevance theory of cognition and pragmatics. More ambitiously, it works towards an overall theory of cognition, which, the editor believes, has been facilitated by the assumptions and claims of relevance theory. The contributors to the volume are well known for their work at the language-cognition interface and each essay is a stimulating and insightful consideration of the problem. The editor's introduction will be invaluable to any reader not fully conversant with current theory, providing the necessary background, and her concluding essay is a brilliant exposition of the way in which Relevance Theory can create links whereby apparently disparate views are combined into a unified modular account of language and cognitive processes.

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.

In this book, renowned philosopher John Kekes develops and defends a humanistic conception of wisdom as a personal attitude-one that can guide how we face adversities and evaluate the often conflicting possibilities and limits of life in the context in which we live. Wisdom includes basic assumptions about the concrete and constantly changing conditions of life; reflective understanding of how we can rely on reason to evaluate the possibilities open to us and recognize the limits we have no choice but to accept; and it includes depth that enables us to accept that perennial problems are part of the human condition and yet to restrain our false hopes and disenchanted reactions to the vicissitudes of life. The evaluative attitude of wisdom is personal, not theoretical; anthropocentric, not metaphysical; context-dependent, not universal; and humanistic, not scientific. It recognizes that there are many forms of worthwhile lives, and denies that there is one ideal of The Good that everyone should try to approximate. It accepts that all of our beliefs, emotions, and desires are fallible, yet they are correctable provided we are sufficiently critical of them. The resulting conception of wisdom is intended as a contribution to philosophy as a humanistic discipline. It is a radical departure from traditional ways of thinking about wisdom.

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.

Most of the time people perceive using multiple senses. Out walking, we see colors and motion, hear chatter and footsteps, smell petrichor after rain, feel a breeze or the brush of a shoulder. We use our senses together to navigate and learn about the world. In spite of this, scientists and philosophers alike have merely focused on one sense at a time. Nearly every theory of perception is unisensory. This book instead offers a revisionist multisensory philosophy of perception. Casey O'Callaghan considers how our senses work together, in contrast with how they work separately and independently, and how one sense can impact another, leading to surprising perceptual illusions. The joint use of multiple senses, he argues, enables novel forms of perception and experience, such as multisensory rhythms, motions, and flavors that enrich aesthetic experiences of music, dance, and gustatory pleasure.

We all take it for granted that we are typically in a position to know about the thoughts and feelings of other people. But we might naturally wonder how we acquire this kind of knowledge. Knowing Other Minds brings together ten original chapters, written by internationally renowned researchers, on questions that arise from our everyday social interaction with others. Can we have direct perceptual knowledge of another person's thoughts? How do we acquire general conceptions of mental states? What lessons can be drawn from experimental work in developmental psychology? Are there fundamental differences between the ways in which we acquire knowledge of our own minds and the ways in which we acquire knowledge of someone else's mind? What sort of cognitive processing underlies our everyday social understanding? How should we best think of the relationship between our complex social life and moral value? The chapters in this volume convey a variety of different perspectives and make a number of novel contributions to the existing literature on these questions, thereby opening up new avenues of inquiry. Furthermore, they illustrate how questions in philosophy and questions from empirical cognitive science overlap and mutually inform one another.

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

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Christopher S. Hill argues that perceptual experience constitutively involves representations of worldly items, and that the relevant form of representation can be explained in broadly biological terms. He then maintains that the representational contents of perceptual experiences are perceptual appearances, interpreted as relational, viewpoint-dependent properties of external objects. There is also a complementary explanation of how the objects that possess these properties are represented. Hill maintains that perceptual phenomenology can be explained reductively in terms of the representational contents of experiences, and uses this doctrine to undercut the traditional arguments for dualism. This treatment of perceptual phenomenology is expanded to encompass cognitive phenomenology, the phenomenology of moods and emotions, and the phenomenology of pain. Hill also offers accounts of the various forms of consciousness that perceptual experiences can possess. One aim is to argue that phenomenology is metaphysically independent of these forms of consciousness, and another is to de-mystify the form known as phenomenal consciousness. The book concludes by discussing the relations of various kinds that perceptual experiences bear to higher-level cognitive states, including relations of format, content, and justification or support.

While the field of vision science has grown significantly in the past three decades, there have been few comprehensive books that showed readers how to adopt a computional approach to understanding visual perception, along with the underlying mechanisms in the brain. Understanding Vision explains the computational principles and models of biological visual processing, and in particular, of primate vision. The book is written in such a way that vision scientists, unfamiliar with mathematical details, should be able to conceptually follow the theoretical principles and their relationship with physiological, anatomical, and psychological observations, without going through the more mathematical pages. For those with a physical science background, especially those from machine vision, this book serves as an analytical introduction to biological vision. It can be used as a textbook or a reference book in a vision course, or a computational neuroscience course for graduate students or advanced undergraduate students. It is also suitable for self-learning by motivated readers. in addition, for those with a focused interest in just one of the topics in the book, it is feasible to read just the chapter on this topic without having read or fully comprehended the other chapters. In particular, Chapter 2 presents a brief overview of experimental observations on biological vision; Chapter 3 is on encoding of visual inputs, Chapter 5 is on visual attentional selection driven by sensory inputs, and Chapter 6 is on visual perception or decoding. Including many examples that clearly illustrate the application of computational principles to experimental observations, Understanding Vision is valuable for students and researchers in computational neuroscience, vision science, machine and computer vision, as well as physicists interested in visual processes.

During the last three decades there have been enormous advances in our understanding of the neural mechanisms of selective attention at the network as well as the cellular level. The Oxford Handbook of Attention brings together the different research areas that constitute contemporary attention research into one comprehensive and authoritative volume. In 40 chapters, it covers the most important aspects of attention research from the areas of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, human and animal neuroscience, and computational modelling. The book is divided into six main sections. Following an introduction from Michael Posner, The Oxford Handbook of Attention begins by looking at theoretical models of attention. The next two sections are dedicated to spatial attention and non-spatial attention respectively. Within section 4, the authors consider the interactions between attention and other psychological domains. The last two sections focus on attention related disorders and on computational models of attention. A final epilogue chapter written by Nobre and Kastner summarizes the questions, methods, findings, and emerging principles of contemporary attention research. For both scholars and students, The Oxford Handbook of Attention provides a concise and state-of-the-art review of the current literature in this field.

The modern world can be a dangerous place, filled with fast cars, smart phones, drugs and extreme sports. Meanwhile, we humans are as fragile as ever. In fact, after a century of decline in injuries and accidental deaths they are on the rise again. The question is – why?

Steve Casner has devoted his career to studying the psychology of safety, and he knows that there’s not a safety warning we won't ignore, or a fool-proof device we can't turn into an implement of disaster.

Based on years of research and understanding of human behavior learnt as a research psychologist, Risk is the definitive user-guide to avoiding everyday calamity. It will help us understand why we behave in such contradictory ways – insisting on fat-free salad dressing but then texting while driving – and explain the psychological traps that can lead us to the scene of an accident. By showing us how and when injuries happen, we learn what we should really be worrying about.

Helping to keep our fingers attached in the kitchen, our children afloat at the pool and teenagers safe behind the wheel, Casner shows us all the ways we can take control of our own safety and get through the day in one piece.

This book elucidates the poetics of Philodemus of Gadara, a first century BCE Epicurean philosopher and poet, whose On Poems survives in extensive fragments among the Herculaneum papyri. Although his treatise was primarily polemical and lacks positive exposition, his views are often recoverable from a careful reading of the debates, occasional direct evidence, and attention to his basic Epicurean commitments. His main critical principle is that form and content are inseparable and mutually-reinforcing: a change in one means a change in the other. The poet uses this marriage of form and content to create the psychological effect of the poem in the audience. This effect is hard to pin down exactly. Poems produce "additional thoughts" in the audience, and these entertain them. It seems clear that Philodemus expected good poets to arrange form and content suggestively, so that the poems could exert a lasting pull on the minds of the audience. Additionally, this book summarizes the views of Philodemus' opponents, the technical terminology of literary criticism in the Hellenistic period, and the history of Epicureanism's engagement with poetics. Epicurus did not write an On Poems but Metrodorus did, and this is probably Philodemus' touchstone for his own views. Zeno of Sidon, Demetrius Laco, Siro, and other Epicureans are examined as well. The book concludes with an appendix of topics examined by Philodemus, such as genre, mimesis, "appropriateness," utility, and various technical terms.

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

Speech perception has been the focus of innumerable studies over the past decades. While our abilities to recognize individuals by their voice state plays a central role in our everyday social interactions, limited scientific attention has been devoted to the perceptual and cerebral mechanisms underlying nonverbal information processing in voices. The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception takes a comprehensive look at this emerging field and presents a selection of current research in voice perception. The forty chapters summarise the most exciting research from across several disciplines covering acoustical, clinical, evolutionary, cognitive, and computational perspectives. In particular, this handbook offers an invaluable window into the development and evolution of the 'vocal brain', and considers in detail the voice processing abilities of non-human animals or human infants. By providing a full and unique perspective on the recent developments in this burgeoning area of study, this text is an important and interdisciplinary resource for students, researchers, and scientific journalists interested in voice perception.

Traditional, secular, and fundamentalist-all three categories are contested, yet in their contestation they shape our sensibilities and are mutually implicated, the one with the others. This interplay brings to the foreground more than ever the question of what it means to think and live as Tradition. The Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, in particular, have emphasized Tradition not as a dead letter but as a living presence of the Holy Spirit. But how can we discern Tradition as living discernment from fundamentalism? What does it mean to live in Tradition when surrounded by something like the "secular"? These essays interrogate these mutual implications, beginning from the understanding that whatever secular or fundamentalist may mean, they are not Tradition, which is historical, particularistic, in motion, ambiguous and pluralistic, but simultaneously not relativistic. Contributors: R. Scott Appleby, Nikolaos Asproulis, Brandon Gallaher, Paul J. Griffiths, Vigen Guroian, Dellas Oliver Herbel, Edith M. Humphrey, Slavica Jakelic, Nadieszda Kizenko, Wendy Mayer, Brenna Moore, Graham Ward, Darlene Fozard Weaver

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.

Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans, a collection of original articles on self-awareness in monkeys, apes, humans, and other species, focuses on controversies about how to measure self-awareness, which species are capable of self-awareness and which are not, and why. Several chapters focus on the controversial question of whether gorillas, like other great apes and human infants, are capable of mirror self-recognition (MSR) or whether they are anomalously unable to do so. Other chapters focus on whether macaque monkeys are capable of MSR. The focus of the chapters is both comparative and developmental: several contributors explore the value of frameworks from human developmental psychology for comparative studies. This dual focus - comparative and developmental - reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the volume, which brings together biological anthropologists, comparative and developmental psychologists, and cognitive scientists from Japan, France, Spain, Hungary, New Zealand, Scotland and the United States.

Attention has long been recognized as a central topic in human psychology. And, in an increasingly 'connected' world, understanding our attentional networks-in particular, their role in the selection of information, the maintenance of alertness and self-control, and the management of emotions-is, arguably, more important than ever. As research in and around the psychology of attention continues to flourish, this new four-volume collection from Routledge meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a complex body of research. The materials gathered in Volume I include explorations of the limits of attention and early empirical work on methods to probe brain activity. The major works collected in the second volume examine critical theories that allow computer programs to simulate and predict how attention operates, while Volume III is organized around the use of brain imaging, cellular recording, and optogenetics to delineate how the brain carries out the functions of attention. The final volume connects studies of attention to applications, including: connectivity to electronic media; brain-based educational curricula, the economics of decision making, and psychopathologies. With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, The Psychology of Attention is an essential work of reference. The collection will be particularly useful as a database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. It will also be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar-and sometimes overlooked-texts. For researchers and advanced students, it is a vital one-stop research and instructional resource.

Since the time of Hippocrates, madness has typically been viewed through the lens of disease, dysfunction, and defect. Madness, like all other disease, happens when something in the mind, or in the brain, does not operate the way that it should or as nature intended. In this paradigm, the role of the healer is simply to find the dysfunction and fix it. This remains the dominant perspective in global psychiatry today. In Madness: A Philosophical Exploration, philosopher of science Justin Garson presents a radically different paradigm for conceiving of madness and the forms that it takes. In this paradigm, which he calls madness-as-strategy, madness is neither a disease nor a defect, but a designed feature, like the heart or lungs. That is to say, at least sometimes, when someone is mad, everything inside of them is working exactly as it should and as nature intended. Through rigorous engagement with texts spanning the classical era to Darwinian medicine, Garson shows that madness-as-strategy is not a new conception. Thus, more than a history of science or a conceptual genealogy, Madness is a recovery mission. In recovering madness-as-strategy, it leads us beyond today's dominant medical paradigm toward a very different form of thinking and practice. This book is essential reading for philosophers of medicine and psychiatry, particularly for those who seek to understand the nature of health, disease, and mental disorder. It will also be a valuable resource for historians and sociologists of medicine for its innovative approach to the history of madness. Most importantly, it will be useful for mental health service users, survivors, and activists, who seek an alternative and liberating vision of what it means to be mad.

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.