Published in the year 1982, Visual Form Detection in Three-dimensional Space is a valuable contribution to the field of Cognitive Psychology.

Published in the year 1982, Visual Form Detection in Three-dimensional Space is a valuable contribution to the field of Cognitive Psychology.

This monograph presents the results of a program of research dealing with the detection of dotted stimulus forms embedded in dotted visual noise. Nineteen experiments are described concerning the detection of single flashing dots, dotted lines, and both random and regularly dotted planes. A mathematical model based upon the autocorrelational transform is also tested for some of the experiments. Among the most important findings are a remarkable insensitivity of the perceptual system to temporal and spatial irregularities and a qualitative difference in the way observers deal with planes formed from random dot arrays and dotted outlines respectively. The autocorrelation model is in general agreement with the psychophysical results against which it is tested. The main conclusion arising from this research may be summarized as the rule of linear periodicity. Observers ar sensitive to forms to the extent that they contain dotted, straight lines with equal interdot spacing. This sensitivity appears to be a primitive of visual perception in a manner that is analogous to the sensitivity exhibited by the autocorrelation to periodic forms. Historical and lexicographic matters pertaining to the problem of form perception are also discussed in this monograph. (Author).

First published in 1984. This monograph is the third in a series that examines the nature of a midlevel visual process relatively uncontaminated by either peripheral receptor or central cognitive processing. The paradigm utilized in this study selectively assays what seems to be a relatively fixed algorithmic mechanism involved in the extraction of dotted stimulus-forms from masks consisting of random dots.

Originally published in 1988, this is the final volume in the set. The original intent of the tetralogy was to review neural explanations of high level perceptual and cognitive processes. However, at this point, it became clear that there were few neural explanations of perceptual topics – a situation that still persists today. This book, therefore, used a different framework examining the role of detection, discrimination, and recognition at the behavioral level.

These four volumes, originally published between 1973 and 1988, were intended to provide a broad survey of cognitive neuroscience, a field known variously as physiological psychology or psychobiology in the 1970s and 1980s when the books were written. The general goal was to summarize what was known about the relation between brain and mind at that time, with an emphasis on sensory and perceptual topics. Out of print for many years, the Tetralogy is now available again, as a set for the first time (which is as the author envisaged it), or as individual volumes.

This research monograph describes a large programming project in which an underwater organism, capable of perceiving, learning, deciding, and navigating, is computationally simulated. The developed computational model serves as a contemporary theory of perceptual-motor performance, embodying much of what is known about human vision and some of what is known about other cognitive processes. This artificial intelligence project has substantial contributions to make to the development of autonomous underwater vehicles. It also makes a specific theoretical statement about the organization and nature of organic perceptual motor systems that may be useful to psychologists, neuroscientists, and theoreticians in a number of other fields.

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.

For many years behaviorism was criticized because it rejected the study of perception. This rejection was based on the extreme view that percepts were internal subjective experiences and thus not subject to examination. This book argues that this logic is incorrect and shows how visual perception, particularized in the study of form recognition, can be carried out from the behavioral point of view if certain constraints and limitations are understood and accepted. The book discusses the idea of representation of forms, considers the major historical neural, psychological, and computational theories of form recognition, and then concludes by presenting a modern approach to the problem. In this book, William Uttal continues his critical analysis of the foundations of modern psychology. He is particularly concerned with the logical and conceptual foundations of visual perception and uses form recognition as a vehicle to rationalize the discrepancies between classic behaviorism and what we now appreciate are legitimate research areas.

First published in 1987. This book is the fourth in a series of research monographs reporting the results of a continuing study that deals with the perception of form in two- and three-dimensional space.