Originally published in 1982, this book introduces the student to the central problem of all perceptual theories: just how does the perceiver identify particular objects? In focusing on the problem, Dr Wilding provides a coherent, well organized framework for its study, bypassing the conventional split between perception and reaction time evidence which was common to most textbooks at the time. The author draws on evidence from a wider number of research traditions and argues that each has a contribution to make to any account of perception. Throughout he emphasizes the methodological basis of the research discussed, in order to provide students with a solid foundation for their own practical work.

Contrary Imaginations was an original and suggestive study of two types of intelligent schoolboy - the converger with his preference for science and the diverger with his leaning towards the arts. In Frames of Mind, originally published in 1968, Liam Hudson extends and enriches this classification and begins to detect the existence of two subcultures. Within these it is not merely a question of leanings towards science or the arts as a vocation: respect for authority, masculine and feminine tendencies, qualities of perception, and the prevalent myths about various callings are all involved. The result is a very human and well-grounded investigation of the profound forces (whether of social origin or based within their own personalities) which, in varying ways, influence young people in choosing a career.

In the late 1970s, reading research had become a true interdisciplinary endeavour with flavours of anthropology, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, educational psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and instructional technology. Given appropriate integration, results from these diverse perspectives can enhance our understanding of reading behaviour tremendously, both in its acquisition and in its skilled functioning. Thus, the enthusiasm for such interdisciplinary interaction had been quite intense for some time. In the years before publication, the National Reading Conference had been doing everything possible to accelerate this interaction. Originally published in 1981, the chapters in this book are the fruits of that effort. The research focuses on specifying skills in identifying alphabetical elements and the rules that govern their combination, on constructing models that characterize the recognition of individual words and the interpretation of texts, and on discovering what factors are responsible for blocking the normal acquisition process in many children. Chapters 2 to 12 of this book reflect these changing foci. They are nevertheless sandwiched by two chapters that deal with the historical background and future outlook of reading instruction.

'How do children see the world?' is a question of immense importance which fascinates not only psychologists but also parents and all those concerned with education. In this English translation, first published in 1976, the author, who was Professor of Psychology at the Rene Descartes University in Paris, provided the most comprehensive review at the time of the development of visual perception in children, a field to which she herself had made a substantial contribution. Her book, which gave the first comprehensive study of the relationship between cognitive development and perceptual activities in small children, explores how they interpret visual information and gradually build up a picture of the world. The author had devoted fifteen years to research on the visual world of the child and possessed an exhaustive knowledge of the experimental literature on the subject in English, French, Russian and other languages. She saw perception as a form of knowledge which the child exploits and adapts in a variety of ways at different stages of development. This is brilliantly demonstrated in her own research on the strategies children use in judging things as 'different' or 'the same' and the way these relate to the structure of their perceptual organisation. This book is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in developmental and cognitive psychology; it also provides an object lesson in the application of experimental methods. In addition the organisation of the material made it a valuable textbook for advanced undergraduate and post-graduate teaching and will still be of interest in its historical context today.

Originally published in 1989, this sourcebook for anatomic studies in the neuropsychology of visual perception contains chapters on disorders of visual agnosias, impaired object perception and spatial neglect, and abnormal visual imagery. The neurological basis of visual perception and the disorders that result from brain damage are discussed. At the time the chapters in this volume constituted a state of the art survey in this area and provided data that were essential for the development of models of normal image and object formation.

In the 10 years prior to publication the quantity of research on eye movements as they pertain to psychological processes had been increasing at a rapid rate. Originally published in 1976, the editors' purpose was to bring together investigators representing different theoretical positions and methodological approaches to present their recent findings, to debate the theoretical points of view, and to identify and discuss the major research problems on eye movements at the time. An attempt was made to invite participants ranging all the way from promising graduate students through the established authorities in the field. The result was an intensive three-day session with meetings from early morning until late into the evening with much opportunity for formal and informal group discussion. The edited papers and transcripts of the discussions are the contents of this book.

Originally published in 1978, this volume reflects the proceedings of a conference held in February 1977 in California and is a natural successor to the earlier volume Eye Movements and Psychological Processes (Monty & Senders, 1976). The second conference was aimed at providing a greater opportunity for discussing the "higher mental processes" touched on in the first volume. Part 1 is devoted to an intensive review of the underlying processes and psychological functions of eye movements. It includes discussions of the relationships of cortical and subcortical visual areas to eye movements and visual processing associated with them; information about the position of the eye in the head and the perception of visual space; saccades and visual functioning; and masking. In further parts it goes on to look at: methodology and models; cognitive processes; reading processes; looking at static and dynamic display; and finally chapters on problems and applications.

Originally published in 1983, this book is about the way we see things - or think we do, which is by no means the same - and about the ways in which we have tried to reproduce that visual concept in diagrams, pictures, photographs, films and television. Whatever the medium, if any degree of realism is intended, some use of perspective is inevitable, and some understanding of it can aid the appreciation of the result. But here the technicalities of perspective geometry are treated as far as possible non-technically, by a common-sense approach. Students, would-be artists or architects, are warned in the Preface that they will travel second-class in the author's train of thought (the 'general reader' coming first), but they may well find the journey worthwhile in that it provides a background to a subsequent, more detailed studies. Lawrence Wright shows that every form of perspective representation has some innate falsity, but that most such forms offer an adequate makeshift; that rules of geometry often need to be bent; that labour-saving dodges and shortcuts exist. As he says, perspective drawing, like politics, is an art of the possible. In reading this book, beginners may find it all simpler than they had supposed, though the established expert may in some interesting respects find just the opposite. The general reader may thereafter find himself seeing things - and representations of them - in a new light.

Originally published in 1977, the chapters in this volume derive from a conference on Perceiving, Acting and Knowing held by the Center for Research in Human Learning at the University of Minnesota in 1973. The volume was intended to appeal, not just to the specialist or the novice, but to anyone sufficiently interested in psychology to have obtained a sense of its history at the time. Through these essays the authors express a collective attitude that a careful scrutiny of the fundamental tenets of contemporary psychology may be needed. In some essays specific faults in the foundations of an area are discussed, and suggestions are made for remedying them. In other essays the authors flirt with more radical solutions, namely, beginning from new foundations altogether. Although the authors do not present a monolithic viewpoint, a careful reading of all their essays under one cover reveals a glimpse of a new framework by which theory and research may be guided.

Originally published in 1981, this volume represents the edited proceedings of the third symposium on eye movements and behaviour sponsored by the US Army Human Engineering Laboratory. The conference, titled "The Last Whole Earth Eye Movement Conference" was held in Florida in February 1980. As the conference approached, seizure of the American hostages by the Iranian militants, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the uncertain economic outlook around the world made it appear as though the title was a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the meeting proved highly successful and people throughout the world seemed to be adapting to the stresses of international tension, making the possibility of subsequent meetings more likely. The present volume is intended to serve as a complementary text to the earlier texts Eye Movements and Psychological Processes (Monty & Senders, 1976) and Eye Movements and the Higher Psychological Functions (Senders, Fisher & Monty, 1978), rather than a revision and update of them.

The work of Richard M. Shiffrin has highly impacted the field of cognitive science, and current developments within perception and memory have been influenced by his ideas. In this volume, several key figures in the field will comment on these developments and put them in a wider perspective. Although many theories and models have been presented in recent years for various aspects of human cognition, there have not been many comparative evaluations that focus on how these models have really advanced our understanding of the underlying mechanisms. This volume will be a valuable source of information for both cognitive scientists working in the field, and researchers and students looking for a clear, accessible presentation of the key problems in cognitive science. Highlighted sections include attention and perception, memory functions and processes, knowledge representation and semantics, modelling approaches and applications.

In the late-1980s, visual cognition was a small subfield of cognitive psychology, and the standard texts mainly discussed just iconic memory in their sections on visual cognition. In the subsequent two decades, and especially very recently, many remarkable new aspects of the processing of brief visual stimuli have been discovered -- change blindness, repetition blindness, the attentional blink, newly-discovered properties of visual short-term memory and of the face recognition system, the influence of reentrant processing on visual perception, and the surprisingly intimate relationships between eyeblinks and visual cognition. This volume provides up-to-date tutorial reviews of these many new developments in the study of visual cognition written by the leaders in the discipline, providing an incisive and comprehensive survey of research in this dynamic field.

This book is a testimony to Evgeny Nikolaevich Sokolov's years of work in developing knowledge in the areas of perception, information processing and attention, and to the research it has spawned. It presents a historical account of a research program, leading the reader toward a cognitive science approach to the study of perception and attention. An understanding of neuroscience and mathematical modeling are helpful prerequisites. The co-authors collected data on orienting, attention, and information processing in the brain using single-cell recordings, central, autonomic, cognitive, behavioral, and verbal measures. This commonality brought them together for a series of meetings which resulted in the production of this book. The book ends with a review of some of the co-authors studies that have developed from or in parallel with Sokolov's research. They investigate, in particular, the concepts of attention and anticipation using a psychophysiological methodology.

In all modern societies almost everyone of their citizens have spent many years in school buildings, and the largest professional group in modern societies, teachers, is working every day during the working year in school buildings. In spite of this, we know surprisingly little about the influence of school buildings on the people who use them and their activities. What do school buildings do with their users and what do users do with the buildings? In this book seven scholars from the Scandinavian countries discuss and use different theoretical perspectives to illuminate the relationship between school buildings and their users.

From Bricks to Brains introduces embodied cognitive science and illustrates its foundational ideas through the construction and observation of LEGO Mindstorms robots.

Discussing the characteristics that distinguish embodied cognitive science from classical cognitive science, the book places a renewed emphasis on sensing and acting, the importance of embodiment, the exploration of distributed notions of control, and the development of theories by synthesizing simple systems and exploring their behavior. Numerous examples are used to illustrate a key theme: the importance of an agent's environment. Even simple agents, such as LEGO robots, are capable of exhibiting complex behavior when they can sense and affect the world around them.

Michael Dawson is professor of psychology at the University of Alberta. Brian Dupuis as a research assistant in psychology and Michael Wilson is a biology undergraduate, both at the University of Alberta.

When most people think of space, they think of physical space. However, visual space concerns space as consciously experienced, and it is studied through subjective measures, such as asking people to use numbers to estimate perceived distances, areas, angles, or volumes. This book explores the mismatch between perception and physical reality, and describes the many factors that influence the perception of space including the meaning assigned to geometric concepts like distance, the judgment methods used to report the experience, the presence or absence of cues to depth, and the orientation of a stimulus with respect to point of view. The main theme of the text is that no single geometry describes visual space, but that the geometry of visual space depends upon the stimulus conditions and mental shifts in the subjective meaning of size and distance.
In addition, "The Geometries of Visual Space: "
*contains philosophical, mathematical, and psychophysical background material;
*looks at synthetic approaches to space perception including work on hyperbolic, spherical, and Euclidean geometries;
*presents a meta-analysis of studies that ask observers to directly estimate size, distance, area, angle, and volume;
*looks at the size constancy literature in which observers are asked to adjust a comparison stimulus to match a variety of standards at different distances away;
*discusses research that takes a multi-dimensional approach toward studying visual space; and
*discusses how spatial experience is influenced by memory.
While this book is primarily intended for scholars in perception, mathematical psychology, and psychophysics, it will also be accessible to awider audience since it is written at a readable level. It will make a good graduate-level textbook on space perception.

"The book is well-organized and comprehensive in covering the essential material. The inclusion of human factors material is a strength that is not covered in other books. . . . The book is a balanced survey which will be of value to graduate students or anyone wanting to enter the field and needing a broad overview." --Steven Yantis, The Johns Hopkins University "My overall impression is that the authors have combined their expertise and experience in the classroom to provide a text that will clearly cover attention more completely and in a more coherent and less confusing manner than any other available text. . . . this is the best available text on the psychology of attention at the advanced undergraduate level." --Mark Faust, University of South Alabama "This text represents a strong review of the empirical and theoretical developments in attention work." --Tom Busey, Indiana University "A nice overview of the 'classic' work on attention, with up-to-date consideration of the literature, usefully bringing together some more applied literatures in which attention is a central construct...The scholarship seems comprehensive and up-to-date, and the authors do a nice job of presenting research in a fair and neutral manner." --Richard Carlson, Pennsylvania State University "The chapters present the material at a level appropriate for a first course on attention. The focus on providing a comprehensive treatment of the highlights of a variety of different topics related to attention is a strength." --Art Kramer, University of Illinois Attention is one of the fastest growing research areas in cognitive psychology. In light of the growing importance of this topic, there are surprisingly few texts that provide a coherent overview of the field of attention. Authors Addie Johnson and Robert W. Proctor have written Attention: Theory and Practice for students, researchers, and practitioners who wish to gain insight into this area in a comprehensible and consistent manner. Attention: Theory and Practice provides a balance between a readable overview of attention and an emphasis on how theories and paradigms for the study of attention have developed. The book highlights the important issues and major findings while giving sufficient details of experimental studies, models, and theories so that results and conclusions are easy to follow and evaluate. Rather than brushing over tricky technical details, the authors explain them clearly, giving readers the benefit of understanding the motivation for and techniques of the experiments in order to allow readers to think through results, models, and theories for themselves. Features and benefits of this text: Balanced. The book gives equal coverage to theory, experimental paradigms and results, neuropsychology, and applications. Adaptable. "Technical Boxes" isolate technical procedures and difficult models, which can be omitted without interrupting the flow of the chapters, allowing instructors to adjust the material to the level of their course. Pedagogical. The book includes brief chapter previews, chapter summaries, highlighted key words, an end-of-book glossary, and an abundance of figures and tables that enhance student understanding. Attention is an accessible text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in psychology, as well as an important resource for researchers and practitioners interested in gaining an overview of the field of attention.

Understanding visual perceptual organization remains a challenge for vision science. Perceptual Organization in Vision: Behavioral and Neural Perspectives explores ideas emanating from behavioral, developmental, neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and computational approaches to the problem of perceptual organization. The growing body of research on perceptual organization has converged on a number of critical issues, most of which are addressed in this volume. These include issues concerning the nature and order of organizational processes, the stimulus factors that engage the mechanisms of organization, the developmental stage at which the mechanisms of organization are available, the role of past experience and learning in organization, the neural mechanisms underlying perceptual organization, and the relations between perceptual organization and other cognitive processes, in particular, object recognition and visual attention. Divided into four parts, the book is designed not only to detail the current state of the art in the field but also to promote an interdisciplinary approach to the study of perceptual organization. Part I presents an overview of the problem of perceptual organization, different frameworks for understanding perceptual organization, and a state-of-the-art summary of the domain. Part II details which organizational processes are hardwired in the perceptual system, which are acquired through experience, and how object perception relates to other aspects of cognition. Part III describes various attempts to understand the neural mechanisms underlying perceptual organization using two different approaches--neurophysiological and neuropsychological. Part IV offers a computational approach to the problem. This book is intended for cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, computational vision scientists, and developmental psychologists.

This book explores the nature of one of the most ancient tools for nonverbal communication: drawings. They are naturally adaptable enough to meet an incredibly wide range of communication needs. But how exactly do they do their job so well?
Avoiding the kinds of aesthetic rankings of different graphic domains so often made by art historians and critics, Manfredo Massironi considers an extensive and representative sample of graphic applications with an open mind. He finds a deep mutuality between the material components of images and the activation of the perceptual and cognitive processes that create and decipher them.
Massironi first examines the material components themselves: the mark or line, the plane of representation (the angle formed by the actual drawing surface and the depicted objects), and the position of the viewpoint relative to the depicted objects. The roles played by these three components are independent of the content of the drawing; they function in the same way in concrete and abstract representations. He then closely scrutinizes the choices made by the person planning and executing the drawings. Given that any object can be depicted in an infinite number of different ways, the drawer performs continuous work emphasizing and excluding different features. The choices are typically unconscious and guided by his or her communicative goals. A successful graph, be it simple or complex, is always successful precisely because the emphasized features are far fewer in number than the excluded ones. Finally, he analyzes the perceptual and cognitive integrations made by the viewer.
Drawings are not simply tools for communication but important instruments for investigating reality and its structure. Richly illustrated, the book includes a series of graphic exercises that enable readers to get a sense of their own perceptual and cognitive activity when inspecting images. Massironi's pathbreaking taxonomy of graphic productions will illuminate all the processes involved in producing and understanding graphic images for a wide audience, in fields ranging from perceptual and cognitive psychology through human factors and graphic design to architecture and art history.

As busy as teachers and scholars are, rarely do they find the time to sample widely from the table of scientific inquiry. This book offers the opportunity to do just that. The fourth volume in the "Studies in Perception and Action" series, it contains a collection of posters presented at the Ninth International Conference on Perception and Action, sponsored by the International Society for Ecological Psychology.
Like its predecessor, this volume is a collection of short reports, mostly empirical in nature. The reports are considerably larger than the abstracts presented in the proceedings of many conferences, and provide the authors with opportunities to present arguments, methods, results, and conclusions in condensed forms.

This volume offers a comprehensive view of posters presented at the VIIth International Conference on Event Perception and Action. Arranged in order of appearance of their corresponding symposia on the conference program, this collection of 80 miniature articles on event perception and action represents the work of 136 researchers from 13 countries.

The major aim of this book is to introduce the ways in which scientists approach and think about a phenomenon -- hearing -- that intersects three quite different disciplines: the physics of sound sources and the propagation of sound through air and other materials, the anatomy and physiology of the transformation of the physical sound into neural activity in the brain, and the psychology of the perception we call hearing. Physics, biology, and psychology each play a role in understanding how and what we hear.
The text evolved over the past decade in an attempt to convey something about scientific thinking, as evidenced in the domain of sounds and their perception, to students whose primary focus is not science. It does so using a minimum of mathematics (high school functions such as linear, logarithmic, sine, and power) without compromising scientific integrity. A significant enrichment is the availability of a compact disc (CD) containing over 20 examples of acoustic demonstrations referred to in the book. These demonstrations, which range from echo effects and filtered noise to categorical speech perception and total more than 45 minutes, are invaluable resources for making the text come alive.

Perception of expression distinguishes our cognitive activity in a pervasive, significant and peculiar way, and manifests itself paradigmatically in the vast world of artistic production. Art and Expression examines the cognitive processes involved in artistic production, aesthetic reception, understanding and enjoyment. Using a phenomenological theoretical and methodological framework, developed by Rudolf Arnheim and other important scholars interested in expressive media, Alberto Argenton considers a wide range of artistic works, which span the whole arc of the history of western graphic and pictorial art. Argenton analyses the representational strategies of a dynamic and expressive character that can be reduced to basic aspects of perception, like obliqueness, amodal completion, and the bilateral function of contour, giving new directions relative to the functioning of cognitive activity. Art and Expression is a monument to the fruitful collaboration of art history and psychology, and Argenton has taken great care to construct a meaningful psychological approach to the arts based also on a knowledge of pictorial genres that allows him to systematically situate the works under scrutiny. Art and Expression is an essential resource for postgraduate researchers and scholars interested in visual perception, art, and gestalt psychology.

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.

Le geste ne peut etre considere en lui-meme et pour lui-meme qu'en se placant dans une perspective restrictive. En effet, le mouvement volontaire s'inscrit dans une action, et dans tous les cas, il est tributaire d'un contexte. Le mouvement est bien ce qui permet d'acceder au monde : ne dit-on pas de certains malades, pourtant conscients, qu'ils " sont mures en eux-memes ", signifiant ainsi que le role de passeur de sens du mouvement est a jamais perdu ? L'une des difficultes majeures dans les tentatives d'harmonisation entre domaines provient du fait qu'il est delicat de faire coincider les donnees provenant des champs neurophysiologique et biologique avec celles issues de modeles linguistiques. C'est pourquoi nous avons demande a des chercheurs appartenant a diverses disciplines (philosophie, psychologie experimentale, sociologie, linguistique et phonetique) d'illustrer la notion de " semiotique du mouvement ". Un premier volet s'attache a preciser les enjeux theoriques du mouvement, de sa conception a sa representation et a sa realisation, d'une maniere generale et dans ses rapports a la vision et a la parole. La deuxieme et la troisieme section apportent des eclairages plus specifiques en focalisant le propos sur les aspects linguistiques.