This dissertation, "Unified Percepts in Three-dimensional Space Derived From Motion in Depth or Rotation in Depth" by Chak-pui, Terence, Lee, 李澤沛, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: ABSTRACT A long-standing challenge to understanding the human visual system is to reconcile our unified visual experience of a three-dimensional (3D) world with findings suggesting that the visual system operates, at least partially, as a modular system. This dissertation is composed of studies that investigate how systematic changes in retinal image structure, and changes in binocular disparity arising from either motion in depth or rotation in depth, are used to derive a number of perceptual judgments in 3D space. The assumption that looming and stereomotion mechanisms operate in tandem, and feed into an early joint motion-in-depth mechanism, is challenged by the findings of Chapter 3. Using the flash-lag paradigm, it was found that stereomotion, but not looming, induces an apparent displacement in the position in depth of a flashed object, and the effect is speed dependent. This finding suggests that, in terms of the encoding of metric depth, the two mechanisms produce qualitatively different results. Moreover, the flash-lag-in-depth phenomenon is accompanied by a novel size effect, which appears to contradict the geometrical predictions typically used to account for size illusions associated with depth perception, and serves as an evidence of top-down processing in deriving congruent estimates of image size and position in depth. Assuming that different mechanisms underlie the computations of 2D motion and motion in the depth, their outputs must be combined at some stage, given that objects in the 3D world often traverse frontoparallel and median planes simultaneously. Findings of how 2D motion affects the apparent speed of motion in depth are reported in Chapter 4. Dots defining a frontoparallel square conducted random walks on its surface, while the square itself moved towards the observer. It was found that apparent speed in depth increases as a function of the speed of random 2D motion. Additionally, the visual system appears to combine motion signals in the twoplanes by vector summation when motion in depth is defined by stereomotion, whereas averaging is implemented when motion in depth is defined by looming. The detection of 3D structure often requires the integration of local motion signals traversing 3D space. An investigation of this process, using cylinders with an apparently identical 3D shape, is reported in Chapter 5. A cooperative integration of disparity and structure from motion was found: compared to bi-rotation in depth, a unified direction of rotation in depth improves detection performance, which can be explained by the functional properties of MT neurons. While the apparent 3D shape of cylinders remains constant for a range of dot densities, sensitivity to the existence of cylinders embedded in random noise increases as a function of dot density, which implies a gradation in 3D-structure interpolation. To examine the effect of apparent orientation in 3D space imposed on the bi-stable appearance of rotation in depth, in Chapter 6 the detection of spontaneous and physical reversals in the direction of motion were compared for cylinders and Necker cubes defined by structure from motion. The frequency of spontaneous reversals occurring with the Necker cube is far lower than with the cylinder and with Necker cubes defined by outlines. Furthermore, physical reversals that occurred with the Necker cube are much more detectable than with the cyli

Phenomenology of Perception: Theories and Experimental Evidence reconstructs and reviews the phenomenological research of the Brentano School, Edgar Rubin, David Katz, Albert Michotte and Gestalt psychology. Phenomenology is commonly considered a philosophy of subjective experience, but this book presents it instead as a set of commitments for philosophy and science to discover the immanent grammar underlying the objective meaning of perception. Pioneering experimental results on the qualitative and quantitative structures of the perceptual world are collected to show that, contrary to the received assumption, phenomenology can be embedded in standard science. This book will therefore be of interest not only to phenomenologists but also to anyone concerned with epistemological and empirical issues in contemporary psychology and the cognitive sciences.

The International Handbook of Psychology is an authoritative resource covering all the main areas of psychological science and written by an outstanding set of authors from around the world. The 31 chapters cover not only scientific but also applied cross-disciplinary aspects. Supervised by an International Editorial Advisory Board (IEAB) of 13 eminent psychologists and edited by Professors Kurt Pawlik and Mark R Rosenzweig, it is being published under the auspices of the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS) by SAGE Publications Ltd in London. The International Handbook of Psychology will be invaluable to advanced undergraduates, graduate students and academics in psychology, and will also be of interest to students of education, sociology, political science, humanities, philosophy, informatics, cognitive sciences, neuroscience, legal sciences and criminology, and will serve as a general resource reference text, written at a level comparable to Scientific American. `This impressive volume covers a tremendous amount of work. It is well organized: authors have generally kept to a standard brief. It is also truly international both in authorship and the origin of the work referenced. This will provide a very useful reference book for undergraduate and post-graduate students′ - British Journal of Educational Psychology

Originally published in 1981, perceptual organization had been synonymous with Gestalt psychology, and Gestalt psychology had fallen into disrepute. In the heyday of Behaviorism, the few cognitive psychologists of the time pursued Gestalt phenomena. But in 1981, Cognitive Psychology was married to Information Processing. (Some would say that it was a marriage of convenience.) After the wedding, Cognitive Psychology had come to look like a theoretically wrinkled Behaviorism; very few of the mainstream topics of Cognitive Psychology made explicit contact with Gestalt phenomena. In the background, Cognition's first love – Gestalt – was pining to regain favor. The cognitive psychologists' desire for a phenomenological and intellectual interaction with Gestalt psychology did not manifest itself in their publications, but it did surface often enough at the Psychonomic Society meeting in 1976 for them to remark upon it in one of their conversations. This book, then, is the product of the editors’ curiosity about the status of ideas at the time, first proposed by Gestalt psychologists. For two days in November 1977, they held an exhilarating symposium that was attended by some 20 people, not all of whom are represented in this volume. At the end of our symposium it was agreed that they would try, in contributions to this volume, to convey the speculative and metatheoretical ground of their research in addition to the solid data and carefully wrought theories that are the figure of their research.

The crux of the debate between proponents of behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology focuses on the issue of accessibility. Cognitivists believe that mental mechanisms and processes are accessible, and that their inner workings can be inferred from experimental observations of behavior. Behaviorists, on the contrary, believe that mental processes and mechanisms are inaccessible, and that nothing important about them can be inferred from even the most cleverly designed empirical studies. One argument that is repeatedly raised by cognitivists is that even though mental processes are not directly accessible, this should not be a barrier to unravelling the nature of the inner mental processes and mechanisms. Inference works for other sciences, such as physics, so why not psychology? If physics can work so successfully with their kind of inaccessibility to make enormous theoretical progress, then why not psychology? As with most previous psychological debates, there is no "killer argument" that can provide an unambiguous resolution. In its absence, author William Uttal explores the differing properties of physical and psychological time, space, and mathematics before coming to the conclusion that there are major discrepancies between the properties of the respective subject matters that make the analogy of comparable inaccessibilities a false one. This title was first published in 2008.