The world is not always truly reflected in what we see. The brain creates images, fills in gaps and even at times constructs fictions. This book brings together experts from several diverse fields to present state of the art accounts of how the visual world enters two small holes in our heads and is reconstructed to give us the rich impressions of color, movement, and shape.

Perceptual Constancy examines a group of long-standing problems in the field of perception and provides a review of the fundamentals of the problems and their solutions. Experts in several different fields--including computational vision, physiology, neuropsychology, psychophysics and comparative psychology--present their approaches to some of the fundamental problems of perception: How does the brain extract a stable world from an ever changing retinal input? How do we achieve color constancy despite changes in the wavelength content of daylight? How do we recognize objects from different viewpoints? And how do we know the sizes of those objects? The volume is divided into three sections. The first describes color constancy, the second examines size, shape and speed, and the third section is on perceptual inconstancies.

Principles of Psychology: Contemporary Perspectives offers students a complete introduction to psychology. It balances contemporary approaches with classic perspectives, weaves stimulating conceptual issues throughout the text, and encourages students to think critically, creatively, and practically about the subject and how it applies to the real-world. It opens with an introduction to the study of psychology at undergraduate level and the positioning of psychology as a science (including coverage of some of its methods), before going on to look at the core domains of study typical in many European programmes and set out in the British Psychological Society guidelines. The carefully developed pedagogical scheme is focused on getting students to think critically about the subject and to engage with its methodological elements, and on demonstrating real-world relevance.Digital formats and resources Principles of Psychology: Contemporary Perspectives is supported by online resources and is available for students and institutions to purchase in a variety of formats.- The e-book is enhanced with embedded self-assessment activities and multi-media content, including animations, concept maps, and flashcards, to offer a fully immersive experience and extra learning support. www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/ebooks- The study tools that enhance the e-book, along with web links to guide further reading, are also available as stand-alone resources for use alongside the print book. Here, lecturers can access a Lecturer's Guide to the book, alongside downloadable PowerPoints, images, and Test Banks for use in their teaching.

"In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of representational mind: perception. Focusing on its form, function, and underlying capacities, as indicated in the sciences of perception, Burge provides an account of the representational content and formal representational structure of perceptual states, and develops a formal semantics for them. The account is elaborated by an explanation of how the representational form is embedded in an iconic format. These structures are then situated in current theoretical accounts of the processing of perceptual representations, with an emphasis on the formation of perceptual categorizations. An exploration of the relationship between perception and other primitive capacities-conation, attention, memory, anticipation, affect, learning, and imagining-clarifies the distinction between perceiving, with its associated capacities, and thinking, with its associated capacities. Drawing on a broad range of historical and contemporary research, rather than relying on introspection or ordinary talk about perception, Perception: First Form of Mind is a scientifically rigorous and agenda-setting work in the philosophy of perception and the philosophy of science"--

In attempting to understand and explain various behaviour, events, and phenomena in their field, psychologists have developed and enunciated an enormous number of 'best guesses' or theories concerning the phenomenon in question. Such theories involve speculations and statements that range on a potency continuum from 'strong' to 'weak'. The term theory, itself, has been conceived of in various ways in the psychological literature. In the present dictionary, the strategy of lumping together all the various traditional descriptive labels regarding psychologists 'best guesses' under the single descriptive term theory has been adopted. The descriptive labels of principle, law, theory, model, paradigm, effect, hypothesis and doctrine are attached to many of the entries, and all such descriptive labels are subsumed under the umbrella term theory.The title of this dictionary emphasizes the term theory (implying both strong and weak best guesses) and is a way of indication, overall, the contents of this comprehensive dictionary in a parsimonious and felicitous fashion.The dictionary will contain approximately 2,000 terms covering the origination, development, and evolution of various psychological concepts, as well as the historical definition, analysis, and criticisms of psychological concepts. Terms and definitions are in English.*Contains over 2,000 terms covering the origination, development and evolution of various psychological concepts*Covers a wide span of theories, from auditory, cognitive tactile and visual to humor and imagery*An essential resource for psychologists needing a single-source quick reference

A renewed interest in the study of vision has attracted scholars from such diverse fields as neuroscience, computer science, mathematics, physics and philosophy. At the same time, the development of imaging devices and popularization of stereoscopic effects has increased student interest in vision. This primer provides an overview of the principles of space perception in a handbook format that should appeal to researchers as well as students. Topics covered include geometrical and distal-proximal relationships, spatial localization, stereopsis, cyclopean perception, stimulus inadequacy, pictorial cues, perceived size and shape, Gibsonian psychophysics, lateral motion, motion in depth, perceived object motion, and motion detection.

The two volume set LNCS 4351 and LNCS 4352 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Multimedia Modeling Conference, MMM 2007, held in Singapore in January 2007. Based on rigorous reviewing, the program committee selected 123 carefully revised full papers of the main technical sessions and 33 revised full papers of four special sessions from a total of 392 submissions for presentation in two volumes.

According to the cognitive penetrability hypothesis, our beliefs, desires, and possibly our emotions literally affect how we see the world. This book elucidates the nature of the cognitive penetrability and impenetrability hypotheses, assesses their plausibility, and explores their philosophical consequences. It connects the topic's multiple strands (the psychological findings, computationalist background, epistemological consequences of cognitive architecture, and recent philosophical developments) at a time when the outcome of many philosophical debates depends on knowing whether and how cognitive states can influence perception. All sixteen chapters were written especially for the book. The first chapters provide methodological and conceptual clarification of the topic and give an account of the relations between penetrability, encapsulation, modularity, and cross-modal interactions in perception. Assessments of psychological and neuroscientific evidence for cognitive penetration are given by several chapters. Most of the contributions analyse the impact of cognitive penetrability and impenetrability on specific philosophical topics: high-level perceptual contents, the epistemological consequences of penetration, nonconceptual content, the phenomenology of late perception, metacognitive feelings, and action. The book includes a comprehensive introduction which explains the history of the debate, its key technical concepts (informational encapsulation, early and late vision, the perception-cognition distinction, hard-wired perceptual processing, perceptual learning, theory-ladenness), and the debate's relevance to current topics in the philosophy of mind and perception, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception is a survey by leading philosophical thinkers of contemporary issues and new thinking in philosophy of perception. It includes sections on the history of the subject, introductions to contemporary issues in the epistemology, ontology and aesthetics of perception, treatments of the individual sense modalities and of the things we perceive by means of them, and a consideration of how perceptual information is integrated and consolidated. New analytic tools and applications to other areas of philosophy are discussed in depth. Each of the forty-five entries is written by a leading expert, some collaborating with younger figures; each seeks to introduce the reader to a broad range of issues. All contain new ideas on the topics covered; together they demonstrate the vigour and innovative zeal of a young field. The book is accessible to anybody who has an intellectual interest in issues concerning perception.

Whether or not infants' earliest perception of the world is a "blooming, buzzing, confusion," it is not long before they come to perceive structure and order among the objects and events around them. At the core of this process, and cognitive development in general, is the ability to categorize--to group events, objects, or properties together--and to form mental representations, or concepts, that encapsulate the commonalities and structure of these categories. Categorization is the primary means of coding experience, underlying not only perceptual and reasoning processes, but also inductive inference and language. The aim of this book is to bring together the most recent findings and theories about the origins and early development of categorization and conceptual abilities. Despite recent advances in our understanding of this area, a number of hotly debated issues remain at the center of the controversy over categorization. Researchers continue to ask questions such as: Which mechanisms for categorization are available at birth and which emerge later? What are the relative roles of perceptual similarity and nonobservable properties in early classification? What is the role of contextual variation in categorization by infants and children? Do different experimental procedures reveal the same kind of knowledge? Can computational models simulate infant and child categorization? How do computational models inform behavioral research? What is the impact of language on category development? How does language partition the world? This book is the first to address these and other key questions within a single volume. The authors present a diverse set of views representing cutting-edge empirical and theoretical advances in the field. The result is a thorough review of empirical contributions to the literature, and a wealth of fresh theoretical perspectives on early categorization.