What do we do when we view a work of art? What does it mean to have an "aesthetic" experience? Are such experiences purely in the eye (and brain) of the beholder? Such questions have entertained philosophers for millennia and psychologists for over a century. More recently, with the advent of functional neuroimaging methods, a handful of ambitious brain scientists have begun to explore the neural correlates of such experiences. The notion of aesthetics is generally linked to the way art evokes an hedonic response-we like it or we don't. Of course, a multitude of factors can influence such judgments, such as personal interest, past experience, prior knowledge, and cultural biases. In this book, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists were asked to address the nature of aesthetic experiences from their own discipline's perspective. In particular, we asked these scholars to consider whether a multidisciplinary approach, an aesthetic science, could help connect mind, brain, and aesthetics. As such, this book offers an introduction to the way art is perceived, interpreted, and felt and approaches these mindful events from a multidisciplinary perspective.

This book revolutionizes how vision can be taught to undergraduate and graduate students in cognitive science, psychology, and optometry. It is the first comprehensive textbook on vision to reflect the integrated computational approach of modern research scientists. This new interdisciplinary approach, called "vision science," integrates psychological, computational, and neuroscientific perspectives.The book covers all major topics related to vision, from early neural processing of image structure in the retina to high-level visual attention, memory, imagery, and awareness. The presentation throughout is theoretically sophisticated yet requires minimal knowledge of mathematics. There is also an extensive glossary, as well as appendices on psychophysical methods, connectionist modeling, and color technology. The book will serve not only as a comprehensive textbook on vision, but also as a valuable reference for researchers in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, optometry, and philosophy.

What do we do when we view a work of art? What does it mean to have an "aesthetic" experience? Are such experiences purely in the eye (and brain) of the beholder? Such questions have entertained philosophers for millennia and psychologists for over a century. More recently, with the advent of functional neuroimaging methods, a handful of ambitious brain scientists have begun to explore the neural correlates of such experiences. The notion of aesthetics is generally linked to the way art evokes an hedonic response-we like it or we don't. Of course, a multitude of factors can influence such judgments, such as personal interest, past experience, prior knowledge, and cultural biases. In this book, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists were asked to address the nature of aesthetic experiences from their own discipline's perspective. In particular, we asked these scholars to consider whether a multidisciplinary approach, an aesthetic science, could help connect mind, brain, and aesthetics. As such, this book offers an introduction to the way art is perceived, interpreted, and felt and approaches these mindful events from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Identifying and understanding the visual cues that determine relative depth across image contours (i.e., figure-ground organization) are central problems of vision science. In this monograph we report the figural cue of extremal edges (EEs), which arise when an opaque convex surface smoothly curves to occlude part of itself. We also compare classical cues to figure-ground organization with the recently discovered cue of EE. Our results show that EEs are surprisingly powerful pictorial cues to relative depth across a contour, almost entirely dominating the well-known figure-ground cues of relative size, convexity, surroundedness, and shape familiarity. These results demonstrate that natural shading and texture gradients in an image provide important additional information about figure-ground organization that has been overlooked in the past 75 years in research on figure-ground organization.

This posthumous volume, the culmination of a long and distinguished career, brings together an original essay by the author together with a careful selection of previously published articles (most by Rock) on the theory that perception is an indirect process in which visual experience is derived by inference, rather than being directly and independently determined by retinal stimulation. Irvin Rock was a global perceptual theorist in the grand tradition of von Helmoltz, Wertheimer, and Gibson. This posthumous volume, the culmination of a long and distinguished career, brings together an original essay by the author together with a careful selection of previously published articles (most by Rock) on the theory that perception is an indirect process in which visual experience is derived by inference, rather than being directly and independently determined by retinal stimulation. Rock's reasons for holding that perception is indirect were mainly empirical. Unlike many theorists, he paid close attention to a broad range of experimental evidence in evaluating theoretical claims. His approach, in which theory and experiment go hand in hand, is well represented in this book. In the first chapter, which is new, Rock lays out the theoretical issues underlying indirect perception. The remaining twenty-two chapters present detailed evidence in support of the indirect view. They are divided into sections covering indirect perception, organization, shape, motion, illusions, lightness, and final considerations. Each section is introduced by the author. Stephen Palmer's introduction to the book places Rock's work within the context of the history of perceptual theory-approaches formulated by Helmholtz (inferential), by the Gestaltist psychologists (organizational), and by Gibson (ecological). Cognitive Psychology series