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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Physiological & neuro-psychology
This book presents a new approach to examining the perceived quality of audiovisual sequences. It uses electroencephalography (EEG) to explain in detail how user quality judgments are formed within a test participant, and what the physiological implications might be when subjects are exposed to lower quality media. The book redefines the experimental paradigms of using EEG in the area of quality assessment so that they better suit the requirements of standard subjective quality testing, and presents experimental protocols and stimuli that have been adjusted accordingly.
Time-to-contact is the visual information that observers use in fundamental tasks such as landing an airplane or hitting a ball. Time-to-contact has been a hot topic in perception and action for many years and although many articles have been published on this topic, a comprehensive overview or assessment of the theory does not yet exist. This book fills an important gap and will have appeal to the perception and action community. The book is divided into four sections. Section one covers the foundation of time-to-contact, Section two covers different behavioral approaches to time-to-contact estimation, Section three focuses on time-to-contact as perception and strategy, and Section four covers time-to-contact and action regulation.
Have you ever wanted relief from feeling discouraged? worried? irritated? locked in habits that ultimately harm you? These negative states--depression, anxiety, anger and addictive habits--are the common colds of mental health. Like mild physical illnesses however, they can cause much distress and, if left untreated, can lead to worse difficulties. "PRESCRIPTIONS Without Pills" offers techniques for resolving the problems that have been provoking your uncomfortable emotions. "PRESCRIPTIONS" guides you back to feeling good and then shows you how to sustain feelings of well-being. Avoid the risk of negative side effects like weight gain and mental dullness that can result from taking pills to reduce your negative emotions. Instead implement these drug-free prescriptions. Use the prescriptions on your own or with help from a therapist. Illustrated with engaging stories from the many clients Dr. Heitler has worked with in her forty-plus years as an internationally known psychologist and psychotherapy innovator, "PRESCRIPTIONS Without Pills" aims to help you navigate the route back to well-being and learn skills that can help you to stay there.
Genetic, hormonal, neurological, and other biological factors need to be taken into account to fully understand sexual orientation. This work represents the latest research and theory on causes of variation in sexual orientation. It looks at sexual orientation as a cross-species phenomenon with numerous determining factors. This work is a collection of chapters by some of the leading researchers in the scientific study of sexual orientation. The theory that many genetic, hormonal, neurological, and other biological factors need to be taken into account to fully understand sexual orientation is espoused in this book. It presents much of the latest research on the causes of variation in sexual orientation and related phenomena. It views sexual orientation as a cross-species phenomenon with both biological and environmental determinants.
Stress is an increasingly popular subject and is studied across a range of areas within psychology. Examples relate to everyday issues like school, family and stress within the workplace. New edition examines stress related to current hot topics, like stress and technology.
During the last few centuries, natural philosophers, and more recently vision scientists, have recognized that a fundamental problem in biological vision is that the sources underlying visual stimuli are unknowable in any direct sense, because of the inherent ambiguity of the stimuli that impinge on sensory receptors. The light that reaches the eye from any scene conflates the contributions of reflectance, illumination, transmittance, and subsidiary factors that affect these primary physical parameters. Spatial properties such as the size, distance and orientation of physical objects are also conflated in light stimuli. As a result, the provenance of light reaching the eye at any moment is uncertain. This quandary is referred to as the inverse optics problem. This book considers the evidence that the human visual system solves this problem by incorporating past human experience of what retinal images have typically corresponded to in the real world.
Optic flow provides all the information necessary to guide a walking human or a mobile robot to its target. Over the past 50 years, a body of research on optic flow spanning the disciplines of neurophysiology, psychophysics, experimental psychology, brain imaging and computational modelling has accumulated. Today, when we survey the field, we find independent lines of research have now converged and many arguments have been resolved; simultaneously the underpinning assumptions of flow theory are being questioned and alternative accounts of the visual guidance of locomotion proposed. At this critical juncture, this volume offers a timely review of what has been learnt and pointers to where the field is going.
Ando establishes a theory of subjective preference of the sound field in a concert hall, based on preference theory with a model of human auditory- brain system. The model uses the autocorrelation function and the interaural crosscorrelation function for signals arriving at two ear entrances and considers the specialization of human cerebral hemispheres. The theory may be applied to describe primary sensations such as pitch or missing fundamental, loudness, timbre, and duration. The theory may also be applied to visual sensations as well as subjective preference of visual environments. Remarkable findings in activities in both auditory-brain and visual-brain systems in relation to subjective preference as a primitive response are described.
In this new millenium it may be fair to ask, "Why look at Wundt?" Over the years, many authors have taken fairly detailed looks at the work and accomplishments of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920). This was especially true of the years around 1979, the centennial of the Leipzig Institute for Experimental Psychology, the birthplace of the "graduate program" in psychology. More than twenty years have passed since then, and in the intervening time those centennial studies have attracted the attention and have motivated the efforts of a variety of historians, philosophers, psychologists, and other social scientists. They have profited from the questions raised earlier about theoretical, methodological, sociological, and even political aspects affecting the organized study of mind and behavior; they have also proposed some new directions for research in the history of the behavioral and social sciences. With the advantage of the historiographic perspective that twenty years can bring, this volume will consider this much-heralded "founding father of psychology" once again. Some of the authors are veterans of the centennial who contributed to a very useful volume, edited by Robert W. Rieber, Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology (New York: Plenum Press, 1980). Others are scholars who have joined Wundt studies since then, and have used that book, among others, as a guide to further work. The first chapter, "Wundt before Leipzig," is essentially unchanged from the 1980 volume.
This groundbreaking text takes current knowledge of the basal ganglia far from well-known motor-based models to a more inclusive understanding of deep-brain structure and function. Synthesizing diverse perspectives from across the brain-behavioral sciences, it tours the neuroanatomy and circuitry of the basal ganglia, linking their organization to their controlling functions in core cognitive, behavioral, and motor areas, both normative and disordered. Interactions between the basal ganglia and major structures of the brain are identified in their contributions to a diverse range of processes, from language processing to decision-making, emotion to visual perception, motivation to intent. And the basal ganglia are intimately involved in the mechanisms of dysfunction, as evinced by chapters on dyskinesia, Parkinson's disease, neuropsychiatric conditions, and addictions. Included in the coverage: Limbic-basal ganglia circuits: parallel and integrative aspects. Dopamine and its actions in the basal ganglia system. Cerebellar-basal ganglia interactions. The basal ganglia contribution to controlled and automatic processing. The basal ganglia and decision making in neuropsychiatric disorders. The circuitry underlying the reinstatement of cocaine seeking: modulation by deep brain stimulation. The basal ganglia and hierarchical control in voluntary behavior. Its breadth and depth of scholarship and data should make The Basal Ganglia a work of great interest to cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, neurologists, neuropsychiatrists, and speech-language pathologists.
What happens when the physical body and the subjective sense of self part company? How do we explain phantom limbs and alien abduction? What are the cognitive, neurobiological mechanisms that support such phenomena? In this special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Spence and Halligan explore all these issues and more, with contributions drawn from an internationally renowned panel of authors, most of whom contributed to a symposium held in Sheffield, England in June 2001 ('The Neuropsychiatry of the Body in Space'). That meeting was primarily concerned with those bizarre and disturbing syndromes that arise when 'body' and 'self', soma and psyche are dissociated from each other, within or beyond the body's surface. Some disorders constrain the space of the body (as in neglect and dissociation syndromes), others seem to extend the boundaries (as with phantom limbs and autoscopy). Still others suggest a permeability of those boundaries (as in alien control and thought insertion, each occurring in schizophrenia). Finally, the body may itself be perceived as having passed into space, the most extreme exemplar being 'alien abduction'. Each paper contains a description of disturbed phenomenology and an account and critique of current cognitive neuropsychiatric findings.
During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic
increase
In an age of rapid advances in behavioural genetics, this book applies a unique genetic-social framework to the study of crime and criminal behaviour. Drawing upon evidence from evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics, it offers an up-to-date and balanced account of the mutuality between genes and environment.
The first book to examine emotional development from birth to adulthood, Development of Emotions and Their Regulation fills in significant gaps in the literature by integrating major developmental theories of emotion with robust research on emotion regulation in adults. Noted German psychologists Holodynski and Friedlmeier have written a work that takes on dominant theories such as the desomatization of emotion as people attain maturity, as well as more recent contextual models of emotional growth. The authors define emotion in terms of attendant expression, feeling, and physical reaction, and describe its development in terms of both universal and culture-specific contexts. This trajectory is characterized first by the origination of emotions and later the move from interpersonal to intrapersonal emotion regulation, including: - Processes that occur during emotional development, starting with infancy - Links between childrena (TM)s emotions and communication strategies - The key role of caregiversa (TM) communication in the childa (TM)s emotional development - How emotions become nuanced and individualized during the school years - The intricate relationship between emotional development and emotion regulation as the person reaches adulthood. Surprising and often startling in its conclusions, Development of Emotions and Their Regulation is sure to spark controversy among students, researchers, and practitioners in the developmental field. It may also signal a paradigm shift in the making.
This is a unique book on the mathematics of signals written for hearing-science researchers. Designed to follow an introductory text on psychoacoustic, Signals, Sound, and Sensation takes the reader through the mathematics of signal processing from its beginnings in the Fourier transform to advanced topics in modulation, dispersion relations, minimum phase systems, sampled data, and nonlinear distortion. While the book is organized like an introductory engineering text on signals, the examples and exercises come from research on the perception of sound. A unique feature of the book is the consistent application of the Fourier transform, which unifies topics as diverse as cochlear filtering and digital recording. More than 250 exercises are included. Many of them are devoted to practical research in perception, while others explore surprising auditory illusions generated by special signals. A working knowledge of elementary calculus is the only prerequisite. Signals, Sound, and Sensation will help readers acquire the quantitative skills they need to solve signal problems that arise in their everyday work. Periodic signals, aperiodic signals, and noise - along with their linear and nonlinear transformations - are covered in detail. More advanced mathematical topics are treated in the appendices. In no other book are signal mathematics and psychoacoustics so neatly intertwined. Researchers and advanced students in the psychology of auditory perception will find this book indispensable.
Alexander Romanovitch Luria is widely recognized as one of the most prominent neuropsychologists of the twentieth century. This book - written by his long-standing colleague and published in Russian by Moscow University Press in 1992, fifteen years after his death - is the first serious volume from outside the Luria family devoted to his life and work and includes the most comprehensive bibliography available anywhere of Luria's writings.
This is a text book aimed at a student taking a course on visual perception. Throughout, the book considers what it means for a man, a monkey and a computer to perceive the world. After an introduction to the subject and a discussion of methods, the book deals with how the environment produces a physical effect, how the resulting "image" is processed by the brain and by computer algorithms in order to produce a perception of "something out there". The book discusses color, form, motion, distance, and also the sensing of three dimensionality. Visual perception and its role in awareness and consciousness is then discussed. The book finishes up with discussions of perceptual development, blindness, and visual disorders. Visual perception is by its very nature an interdisciplinary subject that requires a basic understanding of a range of topics from diverse fields. This book provides a very readable guide to all students whether they come from a neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, robotics, or philosophy background.
A "beautiful and astonishing" (Walter Isaacson, # 1 New York Times bestselling author of The Code Breaker) narrative that examines the many ways to be fully human, told by the first young adult with autism to attend Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. As a child, Jory Fleming was wracked by uncontrollable tantrums, had no tolerance for people, and couldn't manage the outside world. Slightly more than a decade later, he was bound for England, selected to attend one of the world's premier universities. How to Be Human is a "profound, thought-provoking" (Barry M. Pizant, PhD, author of Uniquely Human) exploration of life amid a world constructed for neurotypical brains when yours is not. But the miracle of this book is that instead of dwelling on Jory's limitations, those who inhabit the neurotypical world will begin to better understand their own: they will contemplate what language cannot say, how linear thinking leads to dead ends, and how nefarious emotions can be, particularly when, in Jory's words, they are "weaponized." Through a series of deep, personal conversations with writer Lyric Winik, Jory makes a compelling case for logical empathy based on rational thought, asks why we tolerate friends who see us as a means to an end, and explains why he believes personality is a choice. Most movingly, he discusses how, after many hardships, he maintains a deep, abiding faith: "With people, I don't understand what goes in and what comes out, and how to relate," he says. "But I can always reconnect with my relationship with my Creator." Join Jory and Lyric as they examine what it means to be human and ultimately how each of us might become a better one. Jory asks us to consider: Who has value? What is a disability? And how do we correct the imbalances we see in the world? How to Be Human shows us the ways a beautifully different mind can express the very best of our shared humanity.
This volume is the outcome of an international symposium held in Berlin, FRG, which brought together researchers in the field of infant development. The contributors are from Europe and North America, and have as their primary professional interest either pediatrics, biology or psychology. These fields, in spite of common involvement and large overlap, still have to overcome communication problems and differences in scientific approaches. The emphasis of this book is on the efforts of the participants towards reaching a mutual understanding. In spite of disciplinary diversity, the papers in this book complement each other, and set the scene for future multidisciplinary research and exchange in the field of infant development.
Traditionally, neuroscience and public health have been considered strange bedfellows. Now a new collection of studies shows the two fields as logical collaborators with major potential for the evolution of both fields. "Social Neuroscience and Public Health" assembles current theoretical viewpoints, research findings in familiar and emerging areas, and updates on assessment methods to give readers a unique in-depth guide to the social brain and its central role in health promotion. This stimulating reference spans the intersection of two disciplines, offering new insights into the mechanics of risks, rewards, and willpower, revisiting the developmental effects of adversity and the impact of exercise on brain health, and applying epidemiology to cognitive science. Accessibly written for researchers and professionals within and outside both fields, the chapters include bullet-point and policy implication features for ease of retention. The book's innovative ideas lend themselves to a variety of applications, from fine-tuning disease prevention strategies to deeper understanding of addictions. Included in the coverage: Latest theoretical perspectives on health behavior (e.g., picoeconomics, MCII, and temporal self-regulation theory)Updates on health communications and their effects on the brain.New research on cognitive resources and health behavior execution.Leading-edge studies on the brain, the social world, and stress.Findings from the forefront of exercise neuroscience.A concise introduction to neuroscience methods for the non-technical reader. A rich resource pointing to a promising future in research and prevention efforts, "Social Neuroscience and Public Health" benefits professionals and researchers in public health, medicine, cognitive neuroscience, health psychology, epidemiology, sociology and affiliated fields."
This book honors Naomi Weisstein's foreshortened span of work published from 1964 to 1992. Naomi Weisstein was a pioneer in the areas we now call visual neuroscience, visual cognition, and cognitive neuroscience. Her enthusiastic pursuit of the mind was infectious, inspiring many others to take up the challenge. Despite her time as an active researcher being cut short, Weisstein's impact was far reaching and long lasting, and many of her ideas and insights foreshadowed today's active areas of inquiry into the inner workings of the mind. Comprising contributions from leading scholars in the field, Pioneer Visual Neuroscience outlines Weisstein's many contributions to the study of visual perception and processing and their effects on the field today. This volume will be of interest to anyone interested in visual perception, visual cognition, and cognitive neuroscience.
Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2021 'To compare any book to a Sacks is unfair, but this one lives up to it . . . I finished it feeling thrillingly unsettled, and wishing there was more.' - James McConnachie, Sunday Times In Sweden, refugee children fall asleep for months and years at a time. In upstate New York, high school students develop contagious seizures. In the US Embassy in Cuba, employees complain of headaches and memory loss after hearing strange noises in the night. These disparate cases are some of the most remarkable diagnostic mysteries of the twenty-first century, as both doctors and scientists have struggled to explain them within the boundaries of medical science and - more crucially - to treat them. What unites them is that they are all examples of a particular type of psychosomatic illness: medical disorders that are influenced as much by the idiosyncratic aspects of individual cultures as they are by human biology. Inspired by a poignant encounter with the sleeping refugee children of Sweden, Wellcome Prize-winning neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan travels the world to visit other communities who have also been subject to outbreaks of so-called 'mystery' illnesses. From a derelict post-Soviet mining town in Kazakhstan, to the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua via an oil town in Texas, to the heart of the Maria Mountains in Colombia, O'Sullivan hears remarkable stories from a fascinating array of people, and attempts to unravel their complex meaning while asking the question: who gets to define what is and what isn't an illness? Reminiscent of the work of Oliver Sacks, Stephen Grosz and Henry Marsh, The Sleeping Beauties is a moving and unforgettable scientific investigation with a very human face. 'A study of diseases that we sometimes say are 'all in the mind', and an explanation of how unfair that characterisation is.' - Tom Whipple, The Times Books of the Year |
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