Examining the current state of the research in perception stressing contributions in visual information processing, this volume provides an original and timely account of recent results obtained in this and other related areas of cognitive psychology. The scope of the book is intended to be broad, featuring state-of-the-art contributions from a number of outstanding researchers from different parts of the world -- the United States, Europe, and Australia. The intention is to update areas of considerable theoretical implications and active experimental investigation in this broad field called the "psychology of perception." This volume's main purpose is to highlight, from a cognitive position, a selected number of important theoretical and empirical topics which deal with critical issues in perception and other high level, related cognitive processes such as attention, mental representation, memory, word naming and semantic categorization. The studies reported were designed to answer many far-reaching questions including: * Is the global precedence effect due to low or high level processing? * Can veridical and illusory perception be explained by the same theory? * What is the relationship between attention and perception? * Is perception "direct" or an inferential process? * What mechanisms are involved in picture and word naming and categorization? * How can word and picture processing be modeled? The answers to these questions seek to unite theoretical perspectives on very important areas of cognitive psychology such as attention, perception, representation of visual objects and words, and human memory.

Research on touch and blindness has undergone rapid transformation in recent years, with dramatic developments in technology designed to provide assistance to those who are blind, and advancements in robotics that demand haptic interfaces. Touch and Blindness approaches the study of the topic from the perspectives of psychological methodology and the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art techniques in neuroscience. This book, edited by well-known leaders in the field, is derived from the discussions presented by speakers at a conference held in 2002, and presents current research in the field. The book is arranged in a logical, disciplinary fashion, first discussing touch and blindness from a psychological perspective, followed by an examination from the perspective of neuroscience. Some specific topics include: *processing spatial information from touch and movement; *form, projection, and pictures for the blind; *neural substrate and visual and tactile object representations; and *the role of visual cortex in tactile processing. Touch and Blindness is ideal for researchers in psychology and neuroscience, medicine, and special education.

This collection of research on object perception focuses on holistic and featural properties of objects, the mechanisms that produce such properties, how people choose one type of property over another, and how such choices are improved during the course of child development. The contributions consider alternative perceptual characterizations, the way in which such properties are represented in the mind, how particular properties are more useful in some kinds of tasks that humans perform, and how the developing child learns to cope with different properties in choosing among alternatives to optimize task performance. These papers were written by specialists for specialists in experimental, cognitive, and developmental psychology.

Developed nations are experiencing enormous increases in the number of elderly people in the population. Ageing is a universal complex multifaceted process that profoundly affects mind and brain of all individuals. Important discoveries are being made at different levels of research on cognitive aging: from the molecular/genetic level, to the cell, the network, and the processing of information at the cognitive level. The aim of this special issue is to examine new breakthroughs of the aging mind and brain and how to use this knowledge to promote interdisciplinary research in normal and pathological aging.