Perception As Information Detection

This book provides a chapter-by-chapter update to and reflection on of the landmark volume by J.J. Gibson on the Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). Gibson’s book was presented a pioneering approach in experimental psychology; it was his most complete and mature description of the ecological approach to visual perception. Perception as Information Detection commemorates, develops, and updates each of the sixteen chapters from Gibson’s volume. The book brings together some of the foremost perceptual scientists in the field, from the United States, Europe, and Asia, to reflect on Gibson’s original chapters, expand on the key concepts discussed and relate this to their own cutting-edge research. This connects Gibson’s classic with the current state of the field, as well as providing a new generation of students with a contemporary overview of the ecological approach to visual perception. Perception as Information Detection is an important resource for perceptual scientists as well as both undergraduates and graduates studying sensation and perception, vision, cognitive science, ecological psychology, and philosophy of mind.

Time-to-contact is the visual information that observers use in fundamental tasks such as landing an airplane or hitting a ball. Time-to-contact has been a hot topic in perception and action for many years and although many articles have been published on this topic, a comprehensive overview or assessment of the theory does not yet exist. This book fills an important gap and will have appeal to the perception and action community. The book is divided into four sections. Section one covers the foundation of time-to-contact, Section two covers different behavioral approaches to time-to-contact estimation, Section three focuses on time-to-contact as perception and strategy, and Section four covers time-to-contact and action regulation.

An interdisciplinary exploration of perceptual and cognitive processes underlying the ability to perceive social information, drawing on current research and new experimental techniques. As we enter a room full of people, we instantly have a number of social perceptions. We have an automatic perception of others as subjective agents with their own points of view, thoughts, and goals, and we can quickly interpret minimal visual information to infer that something is animate. This book explores the perceptual and cognitive processes that allow humans to perceive and understand this social information quickly and apparently effortlessly. Top researchers in fields ranging from developmental psychology to vision science consider the perception of biological and animate motion, inferences based on this motion, and the early development of these abilities. These innovative contributions reflect a recent renewal of interest in the attribution of agency and the understanding of goal-directed behavior, which has been accompanied by a rapid increase in empirical discoveries enabled by such new experimental techniques as brain imaging. The research presented in Social Perception suggests that an intuitive understanding of others is an integral part of human psychology, develops early, relies on a network of brain regions, and may be compromised in autism. Contributors Dare Baldwin, Lara Bardi, H. Clark Barrett, Erin Cannon, You-jung Choi, Willem E. Frankenhuis, Tao Gao, Emily D. Grossman, Antonia Hamilton, Petra Hauf, Valerie A. Kuhlmeier, Jeff Loucks, Scott A. Love, Yuyan Luo, Elena Mascalzoni, Phil McAleer, Richard Ramsey, Lucia Regolin, M.D. Rutherford, Kara Sage, Brian J. Scholl, Maggie Shiffrar, Francesca Simion, Jessica Sommerville, James P. Thomas, Nikolaus Troje, Amanda Woodward

Because of the ease with which we perceive, many people see perception as something that "just happens." However, even seemingly simple perceptual experiences involve complex underlying mechanisms, which are often hidden from our conscious experience. These mechanisms are being investigated by researchers and theorists in fields such as psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy. A few examples of the questions posed by these investigations are, What do infants perceive? How does perception develop? What do perceptual disorders reveal about normal functioning? How can information from one sense, such as hearing, be affected by information from another sense, such as vision? How is the information from all of our senses combined to result in our perception of a coherent environment? What are some practical outcomes of basic research in perception? These are just a few of the questions this encyclopedia will consider, as it presents a comprehensive overview of the field of perception for students, researchers, and professionals in psychology, the cognitive sciences, neuroscience, and related medical disciplines such as neurology and ophthalmology.

Human knowledge is primarily the product of experiences acquired through interactions of our senses with our surroundings. Of all the senses, vision is the one relied on most heavily by most people for sensory input about the environment. Visual interactions can be divided into three processes: (1) de tection of visual information; (2) recognition of the "external source" of the information; and (3) interpretation of the significance of the information. These processes usually occur sequentially, although there is considerable interdependence among them. With our strong dependence on the processes of visual interactions, we might assume that they are well characterized and understood. Nothing could be further from the truth. Human vision remains an engima, in spite of specu lations by philosophers for centuries, and, more recently, of attention from physicists and cognitive and experimental psychologists. How we see, and how we know what we see, remains an unsolved mystery that challenges some of the most creative scientists and cognitive specialists.

First published in 1978. Since World War II the field of perception has developed in two major directions. The first evolved out of the traditional psychophysical approach and is manifest today in the new psychophysics. The second direction is in the increasing bond between the fields of perception and cognition. This volume grew out of the context of this second direction, a particular product of two workshops (held in the Spring of 1974 and 1975), organized by the Committee on Cognitive Research of the Social Science Research Council. The Committee on Cognition was organized in 1971 to encourage communication and interaction on specific problems in the area of cognition among the various social sciences.

This volume offers a comprehensive view of posters presented at the VIIth International Conference on Event Perception and Action. Arranged in order of appearance of their corresponding symposia on the conference program, this collection of 80 miniature articles on event perception and action represents the work of 136 researchers from 13 countries.

This text provides an introduction to computational aspects of early vision, in particular, color, stereo, and visual navigation. It integrates approaches from psychophysics and quantitative neurobiology, as well as theories and algorithms from machine vision and photogrammetry. When presenting mathematical material, it uses detailed verbal descriptions and illustrations to clarify complex points. The text is suitable for upper-level students in neuroscience, biology, and psychology who have basic mathematical skills and are interested in studying the mathematical modeling of perception.