This volume includes seminal articles published throughout Anne Treisman's scientific career, which are accompanied by chapters from key figures in the field today. These demonstrate the breadth and depth of her influence on research and theory from psychology to vision and auditory sciences.
Pattern Recognitions by Humans and Machines, Volume 2: Visual Perceptions covers aspects of research on visual perception. The book discusses visual form perception, figure-ground organization, and the spatial and temporal responses of the visual system; eye movements; and visual pattern perception. The text also describes a computer vision model based on psychophysical experiments; perspectives from brain theory and artificial intelligence; and the capacity to extract shape properties and spatial relations among objects and objects' parts. Knowledge-mediated perception is also considered. Psychologists and people involved in the study of visual perceptions will find the book useful.
We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we’ve been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.
The contributors to this book focus on such key aspects of motion processing as interaction and integration between locally measured motion units, structure from motion, heading in an optical flow, and second-order motion. They also discuss the interaction of motion processing with other high-level visual functions such as surface representation and attention.
There are those, such as scientists, who see only the outside of reality, its appearance, its surface, its phenomenal aspect. They are blind to the inside, the substance, the foundation, the noumenal aspect. They dismiss it as non-existent, or illusion, or epiphenomenon. Scientists are those that believe that phenomena have no underlying noumena. What you see is what you get. Seeing is believing. Everything is appearance. Nothing is concealed. There are no hidden variables, and no unobservables. The scientific method says, "Observe". That works only if everything is observable. If there are foundational unobservables, science is catastrophically wrong and has cut itself off from the truth. The only "truth" it can furnish is that of surfaces and appearances with no substance. Those who truly want to understand reality must become masters of both perspectives – inside and outside, noumenon and phenomenon – and see how they relate, communicate and interact.
This book consists of papers presented at an international symposium spon sored and organised by The Rank Prize Funds and held at The Royal Society, London, on 27-29 September, 1982. Since the inception of the Funds, the Trustees and their Scientific Advi sory Committee on Opto-e1ectronics have considered that the scope of opto electronics should extend to cover the question of how the eye transduces and processes optical information. The Funds have aimed to organise symposia on topics which, because of their interdisciplinary nature, were not well cov ered by other regular international scientific meetings. It was therefore very appropriate that the 1982 symposium should be on Physical and Biologi cal Processing of Images. The purpose of the symposium was to bring together scientists working on the physiology and psychology of visual perception with those developing ma chine systems for image processing and understanding. The papers were planned in such a way as to emphasise questions of how image-analysing systems can be organised, as well as the principles underlying them, rather than the detailed biophysics and structure of sensory systems or the specific design of hardware devices. As far as possible, related topics in biological and artificial sys tems were considered side by side.
This book explores two contradictory realities: our continuing belief that nature is subject to our willful control and nature's refusal to abide by this belief. It investigates particular aspects of modern science and spotlights the impact Newtonian science had upon the Western world. It then critically assesses twentieth century developments in science, presenting a number of biological and ecological case studies that document the various limitations that the natural world places upon human knowledge. The analysis argues against programmatic proposals to control nature via genetic engineering and planet management.
The book illustrates that the traditional philosophical concept of the "Universe”, the "World” has led to anomalies and paradoxes in the realm of knowledge. The author replaces this notion by the EDWs perspective, i.e. a new axiomatic hyperontological framework of Epistemologically Different Worlds” (EDWs). Thus it becomes possible to find a more appropriate approach to different branches of science, such as cognitive neuroscience, physics, biology and the philosophy of mind. The consequences are a better understanding of the mind-body problem, quantum physics non-locality or entanglement, the measurement problem, Einstein’s theory of relativity and the binding problem in cognitive neuroscience.
The thirty original contributions in this book provide a working definition of"computational neuroscience" as the area in which problems lie simultaneously within computerscience and neuroscience. They review this emerging field in historical and philosophical overviewsand in stimulating summaries of recent results. Leading researchers address the structure of thebrain and the computational problems associated with describing and understanding this structure atthe synaptic, neural, map, and system levels.The overview chapters discuss the early days of thefield, provide a philosophical analysis of the problems associated with confusion between brainmetaphor and brain theory, and take up the scope and structure of computationalneuroscience.Synaptic-level structure is addressed in chapters that relate the properties ofdendritic branches, spines, and synapses to the biophysics of computation and provide a connectionbetween real neuron architectures and neural network simulations.The network-level chapters take upthe preattentive perception of 3-D forms, oscillation in neural networks, the neurobiologicalsignificance of new learning models, and the analysis of neural assemblies and local learningrides.Map-level structure is explored in chapters on the bat echolocation system, cat orientationmaps, primate stereo vision cortical cognitive maps, dynamic remapping in primate visual cortex, andcomputer-aided reconstruction of topographic and columnar maps in primates.The system-level chaptersfocus on the oculomotor system VLSI models of early vision, schemas for high-level vision,goal-directed movements, modular learning, effects of applied electric current fields on corticalneural activity neuropsychological studies of brain and mind, and an information-theoretic view ofanalog representation in striate cortex.Eric L. Schwartz is Professor of Brain Research and ResearchProfessor of Computer Science, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York UniversityMedical Center. Computational Neuroscience is included in the System Development FoundationBenchmark Series.
Visual illusions are compelling phenomena that draw attention to the brain's capacity to construct our perceptual world. The Compendium is a collection of over 100 chapters on visual illusions, written by the illusion creators or by vision scientists who have investigated mechanisms underlying the phenomena. --