Common Mechanisms In Perception And Action

This volume focuses on a subject at the heart of psychological research into human performance--the interplay between perception and action. What are the mechanisms that translate the information we receive via our senses into physical actions? How do the mechanisms responsible for producing a response from a given stimulus operate? Within this volume, state of the art and cutting edge research from leading scientists in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience is presented describing the approaches being taken to understanding the mechanisms that allow us to negotiate and respond to the world around us. (Midwest).

The studies presented in this issue explore multiple pathways between vision and action, the ways in which vision promotes action, and even the conditions and degree to which action and its consequences can influence vision.

This special issue examines the basic processes of space perception and how these processes interact with action planning and motor control.

The edited book series Studies in Perception and Action contains a collection of research presented at the International Conference on Perception and Action (ICPA). The Studies series has appeared in conjunction with the biennial ICPA since 1991. ICPA provides a forum for presenting new data, theory, and methodological developments relevant to the ecological approach to perceptionaction. This volume is the 9th in the Studies in Perception and Action series, and it contains research presented at the 14th ICPA meeting in the summer of 2007. The sixty papers presented in this volume represent the latest developments in ecological psychology research from four continents. In many instances, the contributions to Studies volumes reflect the first appearance of new ideas in a scientific venue. As a result, the Studies volumes contain the most recent and cutting edge research in perception and action. This volume will appeal to individuals who follow the research literature in ecological psychology, as well as those interested in perception, perceptual development, human movement dynamics, and social processes.

Attention in Action provides state-of-the-art discussion of the role of attention in action and of action in constraining attention.

It's hard to conceive of a topic of more broad and personal interest than the study of the mind. In addition to its traditional investigation by the disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, the mind has also been a focus of study in the fields of philosophy, economics, anthropology, linguistics, computer science, molecular biology, education, and literature. In all these approaches, there is an almost universal fascination with how the mind works and how it affects our lives and our behavior. Studies of the mind and brain have crossed many exciting thresholds in recent years, and the study of mind now represents a thoroughly cross-disciplinary effort. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines seek answers to such questions as: What is mind? How does it operate? What is consciousness? This encyclopedia brings together scholars from the entire range of mind-related academic disciplines from across the arts and humanities, social sciences, life sciences, and computer science and engineering to explore the multidimensional nature of the human mind.

Human infants do not seem to be born with concepts of self or joint attention. One basic goal of Agency and Joint Attention is to unravel how these abilities originate. One approach that has received a lot of recent attention is social. Some argue that by virtue of an infant's intense eye gaze with her mother, she is able, by the age of four months, to establish a relationship with her mother that differentiates between "me" and "you." At about twelve months, the infant acquires the non-verbal ability to share attention with her mother or other caregivers. Although the concepts of self and joint attention are nonverbal and uniquely human, the question remains, how do we establish metacognitive control of these abilities? A tangential question is whether nonhuman animals develop abilities that are analogous to self and joint attention. Much of this volume is devoted to the development of metacognition of self and joint attention in experiments on the origin of consciousness, knowing oneself, social referencing, joint action, the neurological basis of joint attention, the role of joint action, mirror neurons, phenomenology, and cues for agency.

This volume concerns the longstanding intellectual puzzle of how individuals overcome their biological, neural, and mental finitude to achieve sociality. It explores how humans take each other into account, coordinate their actions, and are able to share their inner states and to communicate. Sophisticated views on the bases of sociality are detailed at the level of neural mechanisms, perception and memory, motivation, communication and dialog, culture, and evolution. These insights have been inspired by major strides and exciting new developments in disciplines as far afield as ethology, evolutionary ecology, neuroscience, cognition, memory, developmental and social psychology, psycholinguistics, philosophy, robotics, and sociology. The volume is the first to bridge these disciplinary boundaries to lay the foundations for an integrated and general conceptualization of the bases of sociality and its implications for psychology. Each contribution presents different levels of the grounding of sociality and will further stimulate novel approaches to linking different layers of sociality, from the neural to the cultural level.