In the past two decades, attention has been one of the most investigated areas of research in perception and cognition. However, the literature on the field contains a bewildering array of findings, and empirical progress has not been matched by consensus on major theoretical issues. "The Psychology of Attention" presents a systematic review of the main lines of research on attention; the topics range from perception of threshold stimuli to memory storage and decision making. The book develops empirical generalizations about the major issues and suggests possible underlying theoretical principles.

Pashler argues that widely assumed notions of processing resources and automaticity are of limited value in understanding human information processing. He proposes a central bottleneck for decision making and memory retrieval, and describes evidence that distinguishes this limitation from perceptual limitations and limited-capacity short-term memory.

Over the past two decades, Ray Jackendoff has persistently tackled difficult issues in the theory of mind and related theories of cognitive processing. Chief among his contributions is a formal theory that elaborates the nature of language and its relationship to a broad set of other domains.

Languages of the Mind provides convenient access to Jackendoff's work over the past five years on the nature of mental representations in a variety of cognitive domains, in the context of a detailed theory of the level of conceptual structure developed in his earlier books "Semantics and Cognition" and "Consciousness and the Computational Mind." The first two chapters summarize the theory of levels of mental representation ("languages of the mind") and their relationships to each other and show how conceptual structure can be approached along lines familiar from syntactic and phonological theory. From this background, subsequent chapters develop issues in word learning (and its pertinence to the Piaget-Chomsky debate) and the relation of conceptual structure to the understanding of physical space.

Further chapters apply the theory to domains outside of traditional cognitive science. They include an approach to social and cultural cognition modeled on first principles of linguistic theory, the beginnings of a formal description of psychodynamic phenomena, and a discussion of musical parsing and its relation to musical affect that bears on current disputes in linguistic parsing. The final chapter takes up a long-standing conflict between philosophical and psychological approaches to the study of mind, arguing that mental representations should be regarded purely in terms of the combinatorial organization of brain states, and that the philosophical insistence on the intentionality of mental states should be abandoned.

Ray Jackendoff is Professor of Linguistics at Brandeis University.

We are all more primitive and irrational than we care to acknowledge, says Dr. Leonard Shengold in this profound and eloquent book. We all suffer to some degree from delusions-vestiges of infantile mental functioning that continue into adult life and that at times of crisis manifest themselves in narcissistic thoughts of omnipotence, immortality, or perfection. Dr. Shengold argues that we can never eliminate these delusions of everyday life, but we can lessen their effect if we acknowledge, or "own", them. He asserts that insight into what we are and what has happened to us is a prerequisite for caring about others and for accepting the transient conditions of life-both necessary to attain happiness. Dr. Shengold discusses delusions we all experience as well as delusions associated with paranoia, perversions, being in love, and identification with delusional parents. He illustrates his ideas by referring to the lives and works of such literary figures as Shakespeare, Swift, Tolstoy, Pascal, Rilke, Randall Jarrell, Dickens, Hardy, and, especially, Samuel Butler. Dr. Shengold also brings in relevant clinical material because, as he points out, delusions of everyday life are at the heart of misunderstanding and conflict in life and of resistance to change in psychological treatment. These delusions must be attenuated if therapy is to be successful.

An Odyssey in Learning and Perception documents a fifty-year intellectual expedition in the areas of learning and perception-always with an eye to combining them in a theory of perceptual learning and development, a theory that may be broadly applicable to humans and nonhumans, young and old. In the field of psychology, beginning in the 1950s, Eleanor J. Gibson nearly single-handedly developed the field of perceptual learning with a series of brilliant studies that culminated in the seminal work, Perceptual Learning and Development. An Odyssey in Learning and Perception brings together Gibson's scientific papers, including difficult-to-find or previously unpublished work, along with classic studies in perception and action. Gibson introduces each paper to show why the research was undertaken and concludes each section with comments linking the findings to later developments. A personal essay touches on the questions and concerns that guided her research.

Our experience of objects (and consequently our theorizing about them) is very rich. We perceive objects as possessing individuation conditions. They appear to have boundaries in space and time, for example, and they appear to move independently of a background of other objects or a landscape. In Ontology Without Boundaries Jody Azzouni undertakes an analysis of our concept of object, and shows what about that notion is truly due to the world and what about it is a projection onto the world of our senses and thinking. Location and individuation conditions are our product: there is no echo of them in the world. Features, the ways that objects seem to be, aren't projections. Azzouni shows how the resulting austere metaphysics tames a host of ancient philosophical problems about constitution ("Ship of Theseus," "Sorities"), as well as contemporary puzzles about reductionism. In addition, it's shown that the same sorts of individuation conditions for properties, which philosophers use to distinguish between various kinds of odd abstracta-universals, tropes, and so on, are also projections. Accompanying our notion of an object is a background logic that makes cogent ontological debate about anything from Platonic objects to Bigfoot. Contemporary views about this background logic ("quantifier variance") make ontological debate incoherent. Azzouni shows how a neutral interpretation of quantifiers and quantifier domains makes sense of both philosophical and pre-philosophical ontological debates. Azzouni also shows how the same apparatus makes sense of our speaking about a host of items-Mickey Mouse, unicorns, Martians-that nearly all of us deny exist. It's allowed by what Azzouni shows about the background logic of our ontological debates, as well as the semantics of the language of those debates that we can disagree over the existence of things, like unicorns, without that background logic and semantics forcing ontological commitments onto speakers that they don't have.

Vision therapy techniques can correct not only visual problems, but also cognitive, emotional and physical difficulties. Based on the pioneering work of Dr Melvin Kaplan, this research-based book explains the basis of vision therapy, who it can help, and the outcomes it can bring. Visual perceptual problems can cause an array of difficulties, from reading and writing, to issues with balance, clumsiness, and tunnel vision. Severe symptoms can lead to a diagnosis of anxiety, depression, learning disability or even autism. In this groundbreaking book, Dr Kaplan shows how these symptoms point to interventions that change the way that the eyes process information, permanently counteracting visual deficits and impacting on behaviour. Case studies demonstrate how to plan and implement visual management programs according to a patient's symptoms, illustrating the wide range of life-changing results that vision therapy can achieve for people of all ages, regardless of severity of symptoms. Dr Kaplan also shares his expert knowledge of ambient yoked prisms - a tool that transforms light to alter visual stimulation, dramatically transforming perception and cognition. This accessible book presents readers - including parents and families, clinicians, and other professionals working with individuals with visual perception problems - with a comprehensive introduction to the benefits and methods of vision therapy.

The Cambridge Handbook of Applied Perception Research covers core areas of research in perception with an emphasis on its application to real-world environments. Topics include multisensory processing of information, time perception, sustained attention, and signal detection, as well as pedagogical issues surrounding the training of applied perception researchers. In addition to familiar topics, such as perceptual learning, the Handbook focuses on emerging areas of importance, such as human-robot coordination, haptic interfaces, and issues facing societies in the twenty-first century (such as terrorism and threat detection, medical errors, and the broader implications of automation). Organized into sections representing major areas of theoretical and practical importance for the application of perception psychology to human performance and the design and operation of human-technology interdependence, it also addresses the challenges to basic research, including the problem of quantifying information, defining cognitive resources, and theoretical advances in the nature of attention and perceptual processes.

Why do we enjoy art? What inspires us to create artistic works? How can brain science help us understand our taste in art? The Psychology of Art provides an eclectic introduction to the myriad ways in which psychology can help us understand and appreciate creative activities. Exploring how we perceive everything from colour to motion, the book examines art-making as a form of human behaviour that stretches back throughout history as a constant source of inspiration, conflict and conversation. It also considers how factors such as fakery, reproduction technology and sexism influence our judgements about art. By asking what psychological science has to do with artistic appreciation, The Psychology of Art introduces the reader to new ways of thinking about how we create and consume art.

The neurological condition synaesthesia (the mixing of the senses) has for over a century provoked thought about new ways of artistic seeing. In 'Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia: Thresholds of Empathy with Art', a recently discovered manifestation provides a lens through which to re-examine contemporary art experience. People with mirror-touch synaesthesia feel a physical sense of touch on their own bodies when they witness touch to other people and often to objects. The condition is a rare yet recognizable form of heightened physical empathy: present in just 1 in 75 people, it is associated with an overactivation of the near-universal mirror (neuron) system. Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia places mirror-touch, a social synaesthesia, at the center of dialogue between neuroscience, the humanities, and contemporary art theory and practice in order to explore, for the first time, its powerful potential as a model for the embodied and relational spectatorship of art. Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia brings together essays and conversations by prominent neuroscientists, anthropologists, artists, art theorists, curators, film theorists, and philosophers, as well as mirror-touch synaesthetes, and through proximity, and cross-disciplinary dialogue, dissolves barriers not only between disciplines but between theory and experience. Essays and conversations find common ground not only in quantitative but also qualitative accounts of mirror-touch; the editor has conducted the first set of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with mirror-touch synaesthetes, which is available in excerpted form in the volume's appendix. This collection of thirteen conversations constitutes a performative project at the boundary between art and science that invites contributors to reconceptualize the ways that artworks invite us into relational, co-constitutional forms of spectatorship. Critically refiguring arguments about the 'social turn' in contemporary art that reject the traditional viewer as passive, Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia expands the possibilities of what art we might call 'participatory', and enriches debates around the social agency of perception. In these essays, the blurred thresholds in mirror-touch between sight and touch, and between self and other, are redrawn for an interdisciplinary readership as newly sensitized boundaries between image and action, art and life.

"Helga Nowotny's exploration of the forms and meaning of time in contemporary life is panoramic without in any way partaking of the blandness of a survey. From the artificial time of the scientific laboratory to the distinctively modern yearning for one's own time, she regards every topic in this wide-ranging book from a fresh angle of vision, one which reveals unsuspected affinities between the bravest, newest worlds of global technology and the most ancient worlds of myth."
--Lorraine Daston, University of Chicago

This book represents a major contribution to the understanding of time, giving particular attention to time in relation to modernity. The development of industrialism, the author points out, was based upon a linear and abstract conception of time. Today we see that form of production, and the social institutions associated with it, supplanted by flexible specialization and just-in-time production systems. New information and communication technologies have made a fundamental impact here. But what does all this mean for temporal regimes? How can we understand the transformation of time and space involved in the bewildering variety of options on offer in a postmodern world?

The author provides an incisive analysis of the temporal implications of modern communication. She considers the implications of worldwide simultaneous experience, made possible by satellite technologies, and considers the reorganization of time involved in the continuous technological innovation that marks our era. In this puzzling universe of action, how does one achieve a 'time of one's own'? The discovery of a specific time perspective centred in the individual, she shows, expresses ayearning for forms of experience that are subversive of established institutional patterns.

This brilliant study, became a classic in Germany, will be of interest to students and professionals working in the areas of social theory, sociology, politics and anthropology.

A thoughtful exploration of time and how we make it do our bidding

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

Our words and ideas refer to objects and properties in the external world; this phenomenon is central to thought, language, communication, and science. But great works of fiction are full of names that don't seem to refer to anything! In this book Kenneth A. Taylor explores the myriad of problems that surround the phenomenon of reference. How can words in language and perturbations in our brains come to stand for external objects? Reference is essential to truth, but which is more basic: reference or truth? How can fictional characters play such an important role in imagination and literature, and how does this use of language connect with more mundane uses? Taylor develops a framework for understanding reference, and the theories that other thinkers-past and present-have developed about it. But Taylor doesn't simply tell us what others thought; the book is full of new ideas and analyses, making for a vital final contribution from a seminal philosopher.

How do you feel when you bite into a pear... wear a feather boa... stand in a noisy auditorium... or look for a friend in a crowd? Living Sensationally explains how people's individual sensory patterns affect the way we react to everything that happens to us throughout the day. Some people will adore the grainy texture of a pear, while others will shudder at the idea of this texture in their mouths. Touching a feather boa will be fun and luxurious to some, and others will bristle at the idea of all those feathers brushing on the skin. Noisy, busy environments will energize some people, and will overwhelm others. The author identifies four major sensory types: Seekers; Bystanders; Avoiders and Sensors. Readers can use the questionnaire to find their own patterns and the patterns of those around them, and can benefit from practical sensory ideas for individuals, families and businesses. Armed with the information in Living Sensationally, people will be able to pick just the right kind of clothing, job and home and know why they are making such choices.

The world expert in multisensory perception on the remarkable ways we can use our senses to lead richer lives 'Talks total sense, lots of fun facts, right up there with the best of the best' Chris Evans 'Packed with studies on pain, attention, memory, mood' The Times How can the furniture in your home affect your wellbeing? What colour clothing will help you play sport better? And what simple trick will calm you after a tense day at work? In this revelatory book, pioneering and entertaining Oxford professor Charles Spence shows how our senses change how we think and feel, and how by 'hacking' them we can reduce stress, become more productive and be happier. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, and yet it's the scent of expensive face cream that removes wrinkles (temporarily), a room actually feels warmer if you use a warmer paint colour, and the noise of the crowd really does affect the referee's decision. Understanding how our senses interact can produce incredible results. This is popular science at its unbelievable best. 'Spence does for the senses what Marie Kondo does for homes' Avery Gilbert, author of What the Nose Knows 'Everything you need to know about how to cope with the hidden sensory overload of modern life, engagingly told' Robin Dunbar, author of How Many Friends Does One Person Need?

The bestselling author of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" describes how we experience the visual world. In "Musicophilia", Oliver Sacks explored music and the brain; now, in "The Mind's Eye", he writes about the myriad ways in which we experience the visual world: how we see in three dimensions; how we recognize individual faces or places; how we use language to communicate verbally; how we translate marks on paper into words and paragraphs, even how we represent the world internally when our eyes are closed. Alongside remarkable stories of people who have lost these abilities but adapted with courage, resilience and ingenuity, there is an added, personal element: one day in late 2005, Sacks became aware of a dazzling, flashing light in one part of his visual field; it was not the familiar migraine aura he had experienced since childhood, and just two days later a malignant tumor in one eye was diagnosed. In subsequent journal entries - some of which are included in "The Mind's Eye" - he chronicled the experience of living with cancer, recording both the effects of the tumor itself, and radiation therapy. In turning himself into a case history, Sacks has given us perhaps his most intimate, impressive and insightful (no pun intended) book yet.

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.

Our experience of the world is influenced by numerous spatial biases, most of which influence us without our being aware of them. These biases are related to illusions and asymmetries in our perception of space, relationships between space and other qualities, dynamics of moving objects, dynamics of scene configuration, and dynamics related to perception and action. Consideration of these biases provides insight into how we perceive, remember, and navigate space, as well as how we interact with objects and people in space. This volume introduces and reviews numerous spatial biases, and provides descriptions and examples of each bias. The contributors discuss historical and current theories for many biases, and for some biases, provide new explanatory theories. Providing a 'one-stop shop' for information on such a key aspect of our experience in the world, this volume will interest anyone curious about our understanding of space.

Drawing on the phenomenological tradition in the philosophy of science and philosophy of nature, Patrick Heelan concludes that perception is a cognitive, world-building act, and is therefore never absolute or finished.

Is the human eye like a camera? What makes your ears 'pop' on a plane? Why did women in the Middle Ages put belladonna into their eyes? This fully updated 2nd edition of Sensation and Perception is an accessible introduction to the field of perception. It covers in detail the perceptual processes related to vision and hearing, taste and smell, touch and pain, as well as the vestibular and proprioceptive systems. From seeing in colour to pathologies of perception, and from recognising faces to research methods, this textbook is essential reading for any student of perception. New material includes: * 'Applications' features connect key content to real-life contexts * Thinking Critically feature pushes students beyond the basics * End-of-chapter essay questions * An entirely new chapter on Action & Perception John Harris is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Reading Jared Smith is Senior Research Fellow at the Population Health Research Institute of St George's, University of London

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

Speech Perception and Spoken Word Recognition features contributions from the field's leading scientists, and covers recent developments and current issues in the study of cognitive and neural mechanisms that take patterns of air vibrations and turn them 'magically' into meaning. The volume makes a unique theoretical contribution in linking behavioural and cognitive neuroscience research, and cutting across traditional strands of study, such as adult and developmental processing. The book: Focusses on the state of the art in the study of speech perception and spoken word recognition Discusses the interplay between behavioural and cognitive neuroscience evidence, and between adult and developmental research Evaluates key theories in the field and relates them to recent empirical advances, including the relationship between speech perception and speech production, meaning representation and real-time activation, and bilingual and monolingual spoken word recognition Examines emerging areas of study such as word learning and time-course of memory consolidation, and how the science of human speech perception can help computer speech recognition Overall this book presents a renewed focus on theoretical and developmental issues, as well as a multifaceted and broad review of the state of research, in speech perception and spoken word recognition. Particularly interested readers will be researchers of psycholinguistics and adjoining fields as well as advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Synaesthesia is, in the words of the cognitive neuroscientist Cytowic, a strange sensory blending. Synaesthetes report seeing colours when hearing sounds or proper names, or they experience tastes when reading the names of subway stations. How do these rare cases relate to other more common examples where sensory experiences get mixed - cases like mirror-touch, personification, cross-modal mappings, and drug experiences? Are we all more or less synaesthetes, and does this mean that we are all subjects of crossmodal illusions? Could some apparently strange sensory cases give us an insight into how perception works? Recent research on the causes and prevalence of synaesthesia raises new questions regarding the links between these cases, and the unity of the condition. By bringing together contributions from leading cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers, this volume considers for the first time the broader theoretical lessons arising from such cases of sensory blending, with regard to the nature of perception and consciousness, the boundaries between perception, illusion and imagination, and the communicability and sharing of experiences.