Being both broad - perception and motor organization - and narrow - just onegroup of animals - at the same time, this book presents a new unified framework for understanding perceptuomotor organization, stressing the importance of an ecological perspective. Section I reviews recent research on a variety of sensory and perceptual processes in birds, which all involve subtle analyses of the relationships between species' perceptual mechanisms and their ecology and behaviour. Section II describes the variousresearch approaches - behavioural, neurophysiological, anatomical and comparative - all dealing with the common problem of understanding how the activities of large numbers of muscles are coordinated to generate adaptive behaviour. Section III is concerned with a range of approaches to analyzing the links between perceptual and motor processes, through cybernetic modelling, neurophysiological analysis, and behavioural methods.

The new edition of this comprehensive text continues to provide a detailed and up-to-date account of research on visual perception, while maintaining the emphasis of earlier editions on the functional context of vision. Reflecting recent theoretical developments, the book is organised around the distinction between two broad functions of vision, to provide awareness and to control action.
In Part I, the account of visual processing in the brain has been extensively updated, and evidence from neuroimaging and neuropsychology has been integrated into a critical account of the 'two pathways' theory of visual cortex. The revision of chapters in Part II has given particular attention to recent advances in integrating psychophysical, physiological and computational approaches to problems such as the perception of surfaces and of motion. With the help of new illustrations, full introductions are provided to the key mathematical concepts used in these areas. In Part III, three new chapters draw on evidence from both animal and human behaviour to cover optic flow and locomotion, the timing of actions, and perception of the social world. The concluding chapter considers critically the wider theoretical implications of the distinction between awareness and action as separate functions of vision.
Visual Perception, Fourth Edition will be an invaluable resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychology, biology, physiology and neuroscience, as well as researchers in the fields of visual neuroscience, visual perception and animal behaviour.

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