Historical analysis reveals that perceptual theories and models are doomed to relatively short lives. The most popular contemporary theories in perceptual science do not have as wide an acceptance among researchers as do some of those in other sciences. To understand these difficulties, the authors of the present volume explore the conceptual and philosophical foundations of perceptual science. Based on logical analyses of various problems, theories, and models, they offer a number of reasons for the current weakness of perceptual explanations. New theoretical approaches are also proposed. At the end of each chapter, dicussants contribute to the conclusions by critically examining the authors' ideas and analyses.
A comprehensive and integrated introduction to the phenomena and theories of perceptual learning, focusing on the visual domain. Practice or training in perceptual tasks improves the quality of perceptual performance, often by a substantial amount. This improvement is called perceptual learning (in contrast to learning in the cognitive or motor domains), and it has become an active area of research of both theoretical and practical significance. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the phenomena and theories of perceptual learning, focusing on the visual domain. Perceptual Learning explores the tradeoff between the competing goals of system stability and system adaptability, signal and noise, retuning and reweighting, and top-down versus bottom-down processes. It examines and evaluates existing research and potential future directions, including evidence from behavior, physiology, and brain imaging, and existing perceptual learning applications, with a focus on important theories and computational models. It also compares visual learning to learning in other perceptual domains, and considers the application of visual training methods in the development of perceptual expertise and education as well as in remediation for limiting visual conditions. It provides an integrated treatment of the subject for students and researchers and for practitioners who want to incorporate perceptual learning into their practice.Practice or training in perceptual tasks improves the quality of perceptual performance, often by a substantial amount. This improvement is called perceptual learning, in contrast with learning in the cognitive or motor domains. Perceptual learning has been a very active area of research of both theoretical and practical interest. Research on perceptual learning is of theoretical significance in illuminating plasticity in adult perceptual systems, and in understanding the limitations of human information processing and how to improve them. It is of practical significance as a potential method for the development of perceptual expertise in the normal population, for its potential in advancing development and supporting healthy aging, and for noninvasive amelioration of deficits in challenged populations by training. Perceptual learning has become an increasingly important topic in biomedical research. Practitioners in this area include science disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, computer sciences, and optometry, and developers in applied areas of learning game design, cognitive development and aging, and military and biomedical applications. Commercial development of training products, protocols, and games is a multi-billion dollar industry. Perceptual learning provides the basis for many of the developments in these areas. This book is written for anyone who wants to understand the phenomena and theories of perceptual learning or to apply the technology of perceptual learning to the development of training methods and products. Our aim is to provide an introduction to those researchers and students just entering this exciting field, to provide a comprehensive and integrated treatment of the phenomena and the theories of perceptual learning for active perceptual learning researchers, and to describe and develop the basic techniques and principles for readers who want to successfully incorporate perceptual learning into applied developments. The book considers the special challenges of perceptual learning that balance the competing goals of system stability and system adaptability. It provides a systematic treatment of the major phenomena and models in perceptual learning, the determinants of successful learning and of specificity and transfer. The book provides a cohesive consideration of the broad range of perceptual learning through the theoretical framework of incremental learning of reweighting evidence that supports successful task performance. It provides a detailed analysis of the mechanisms by which perceptual learning improves perceptual limitations, the relationship of perceptual learning and the critical period of development, and the semi-supervised modes of learning that dominate perceptual learning. It considers limitations and constraints on learning multiple tasks and stimuli simultaneously, the implications of training at high or low levels of performance accuracy, and the importance of feedback to perceptual learning. The basis of perceptual learning in physiology is discussed along with the relationship of visual perceptual learning to learning in other sensory domains. The book considers the applications of perceptual learning in the development of expertise, in education and gaming, in training during development and aging, and applications to remediation of mental health and vision disorders. Finally, it applies the phenomena and models of perceptual learning to considerations of optimizing training.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist explores how the mind works—an early landmark in the field of cognitive science. The Sensory Order, first published in 1952, sets forth F. A. Hayek's classic theory of mind in which he describes the mental mechanism that classifies perceptions that cannot be accounted for by physical laws. Though Hayek is more commonly known as an icon in the field of economics, his genius was wide-ranging—and his contribution to theoretical psychology is of continuing significance to cognitive scientists as well as to economists interested in the interplay between psychology and market systems, and has been addressed in the work of Thomas Szasz, Gerald Edelman, and Joaquin Fuster. “A most encouraging example of a sustained attempt to bring together information, inference, and hypothesis in the several fields of biology, psychology, and philosophy.”—Quarterly Review of Biology
Foundations of Perception provides a comprehensive general introduction to perception. All the major and minor senses are covered, not only examining them from a perceptual perspective but also taking into account their biological and physical context. In addition to covering all material essential to understanding the functioning of the senses, each chapter also includes a 'Tutorials' section. This provides an opportunity for more advanced students to explore supplementary information on recent or controversial developments in subjects such as: The physics and biology of audition ; Shape and object perception ; Individual differences in perception.
Ontology was once understood to be the philosophical inquiry into the structure of reality: the analysis and categorization of ‘what there is’. Recently, however, a field called ‘ontology’ has become part of the rapidly growing research industry in information technology. The two fields have more in common than just their name. Theory and Applications of Ontology is a two-volume anthology that aims to further an informed discussion about the relationship between ontology in philosophy and ontology in information technology. It fills an important lacuna in cutting-edge research on ontology in both fields, supplying stage-setting overview articles on history and method, presenting directions of current research in either field, and highlighting areas of productive interdisciplinary contact. Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives presents ontology in philosophy in ways that computer scientists are not likely to find elsewhere. The volume offers an overview of current research traditions in ontology, contrasting analytical, phenomenological, and hermeneutic approaches. It introduces the reader to current philosophical research on those categories of everyday and scientific reasoning that are most relevant to present and future research in information technology.
The philosophy of perception is a microcosm of the metaphysics of mind. Its central problems—What is perception? What is the nature of perceptual consciousness? How can one fit an account of perceptual experience into a broader account of the nature of the mind and the world?—are at the heart of metaphysics. Rather than try to cover all of the many strands in the philosophy of perception, this book focuses on a particular orthodoxy about the nature of visual perception. The central problem for visual science has been to explain how the brain bridges the gap between what is given to the visual system and what is actually experienced by the perceiver. The orthodox view of perception is that it is a process whereby the brain, or a dedicated subsystem of the brain, builds up representations of relevant figures of the environment on the basis of information encoded by the sensory receptors. Most adherents of the orthodox view also believe that for every conscious perceptual state of the subject, there is a particular set of neurons whose activities are sufficient for the occurrence of that state. Some of the essays in this book defend the orthodoxy; most criticize it; and some propose alternatives to it. Many of the essays are classics. Contributors G.E.M. Anscombe, Dana Ballard, Daniel Dennett, Fred Dretske, Jerry Fodor, H.P. Grice, David Marr, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Zenon Pylyshyn, Paul Snowdon, and P.F. Strawson
Dr. William Glasser offers a new psychology that, if practiced, could reverse our widespread inability to get along with one another, an inability that is the source of almost all unhappiness. For progress in human relationships, he explains that we must give up the punishing, relationship–destroying external control psychology. For example, if you are in an unhappy relationship right now, he proposes that one or both of you could be using external control psychology on the other. He goes further. And suggests that misery is always related to a current unsatisfying relationship. Contrary to what you may believe, your troubles are always now, never in the past. No one can change what happened yesterday.
Do you wonder how movies – sequences of static frames – appear to move, or why 3-D films look different from traditional movies? Why does ventriloquism work, and why can airliner flights make you feel disoriented? The answers to these and other questions about the human senses can be found within the pages of Foundations of Sensation and Perception. This third edition maintains the standard for clarity and accessibility combined with rigor which was set in previous editions, making it suitable for a wide range of students. As in the previous editions, the early chapters allow students to grasp fundamental principles in relation to the relatively simple sensory systems (smell, taste, touch and balance) before moving on to more complex material in hearing and vision. The text has been extensively updated, and this new edition includes: a new chapter devoted to attention and perception over 200 new references over 30 new figures and improved, more colorful, visual presentation a new companion website with a range of resources for students and lecturers The book contains a range of pedagogical features, including tutorial sections at the end of each chapter. This distinctive feature introduces areas of the subject which are rarely included in student texts, but are crucial for establishing a firm foundation of knowledge. Some tutorials are devoted to more advanced and technical topics (optics, light measurement, Bayesian inference), but treated in an accessible manner, while others cover topics a little outside of the mainstream (music perception, consciousness, visual art). Foundations of Sensation and Perception will enable the reader to achieve a firm grasp of current knowledge concerning the processes that underlie our perception of the world and will be an invaluable resource for those studying psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines.
Observer Mechanics: A Formal Theory of Perception provides information pertinent to the fundamental aspects of perception. This book provides an approach to the study of perception that attempts to be both general and rigorous. Organized into 10 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the structure of perceptual capacity. This text then presents the relationship between observers and Turing machines. Other chapters provide a formal framework in which to describe an observer and its objects of perception, and then develop from this framework a perceptual dynamics. This book discusses as well the conditions in which an observer may be said to perceive truly and discusses how stabilities in perceptual dynamics might permit the genesis of higher level observers. The final chapter deals with the relationship between the formalisms of quantum mechanics and observer mechanics. This book is a valuable resource for physicists, psychophysicists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and perceptual psychologists.
Anthony J. Lisska presents a new analysis of Thomas Aquinas's theory of perception. While much work has been undertaken on Aquinas's texts, little has been devoted principally to his theory of perception and less still on a discussion of inner sense. The thesis of intentionality serves as the philosophical backdrop of this analysis while incorporating insights from Brentano and from recent scholarship. The principal thrust is on the importance of inner sense, a much-overlooked area of Aquinas's philosophy of mind, with special reference to the vis cogitativa. Approaching the texts of Aquinas from contemporary analytic philosophy, Lisska suggests a modest 'innate' or 'structured' interpretation for the role of this inner sense faculty. Dorothea Frede suggests that this faculty is an 'embarrassment' for Aquinas; to the contrary, the analysis offered in this book argues that were it not for the vis cogitativa, Aquinas's philosophy of mind would be an embarrassment. By means of this faculty of inner sense, Aquinas offers an account of a direct awareness of individuals of natural kinds—referred to by Aquinas as incidental objects of sense—which comprise the principal ontological categories in Aquinas's metaphysics. By using this awareness of individuals of a natural kind, Aquinas can make better sense out of the process of abstraction using the active intellect (intellectus agens). Were it not for the vis cogitativa, Aquinas would be unable to account for an awareness of the principal ontological category in his metaphysics.
