Spatial Biases In Perception And Cognition

Numerous spatial biases influence navigation, interactions, and preferences in our environment. This volume considers their influences on perception and memory.

Space provides the stage for our social lives - social thought evolved and developed in a constant interaction with space. The volume demonstrates how this has led to an astonishing intertwining of spatial and social thought. For the first time, research on language comprehension, metaphors, priming, spatial perception, face perception, art history and other fields is brought together to provide an integrative view. This overview confirms that often, metaphors reveal a deeper truth about how our mind uses spatial information to represent social concepts. Yet, the evidence also goes beyond this insight, showing for instance how flexible our mind operates with spatial metaphors, how the peculiarities of our bodies determine the way we assign meaning to space, and how the asymmetry of our brain influences spatial and face perception. Finally, it is revealed that also how we write language - from left to right or from right to left - shapes how we perceive, interpret, and produce horizontal movement and order. The evidence ranges from linguistics to social and spatial perception to neuropsychology, seamlessly integrating such diverse findings as speed in word comprehension, children's depictions of abstract concepts, estimates of the steepness of hills, and archival research on how often Homer Simpson is depicted left or right of Marge. The chapters in this book offer a topology of social cognition and explore the pivotal role language plays in creating links between spatial and social thought.

The book is concerned with the cognitive contributions to perception, that is, with the influence of attention, intention, or motor processes on performances in spatial and temporal tasks. The chapters deal with fundamental perceptual processes resulting from the simple localization of an object in space or from the temporal determination of an event within a series of events. Chapters are based on presentations given at the Symposium on the Cognitive Contributions to the Perception of Spatial and Temporal Events (September 7-9, 1998, Ohlstadt, Germany). Following each chapter are commentary pieces from other researchers in the field. At the meeting, contributors were encouraged to discuss their theoretical positions along with presenting empirical results and the book's commentary sections help to preserve the spirit and controversies of the symposium. The general topic of the book is split into three parts. Two sections are devoted to the perception of unimodal spatial and temporal events; and are accompanied by a third part on spatio-temporal processes in the domain of intermodal integration. The themes of the book are highly topical. There is a growing interest in studies both with healthy persons and with patients that focus on localization errors and dissociations in localizations resulting from different tasks. These errors lead to new concepts of how visual space is represented. Such deviations are not only observed in the spatial domain but in the temporal domain as well. Typical examples are errors in duration judgments or synchronization errors in tapping tasks. In addition, several studies indicate the influence of attention on both the timing and on the localization of dynamic events. Another intriguing question originates from well-known interactions between intermodal events, namely, whether these events are based on a single representation or whether different representations interact.

Cognitive neuroscience is the interdisciplinary study of how cognitive and intellectual functions are processed and represented within the brain, which is critical to building understanding of core psychological and behavioural processes such as learning, memory, behaviour, perception, and consciousness. Understanding these processes not only offers relevant fundamental insights into brain-behavioural relations, but may also lead to actionable knowledge that can be applied in the clinical treatment of patients with various brain-related disabilities. This Handbook examines complex cognitive systems through the lens of neuroscience, as well as providing an overview of development and applications within cognitive and systems neuroscience research and beyond. Containing 35 original, state of the art contributions from leading experts in the field, this Handbook is essential reading for researchers and students of cognitive psychology, as well as scholars across the fields of neuroscientific, behavioural and health sciences. Part 1: Attention, Learning and Memory Part 2: Language and Communication Part 3: Emotion and Motivation Part 4: Social Cognition Part 5: Cognitive Control and Decision Making Part 6: Intelligence

This book offers students an introduction to human spatial cognition and experience and is designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students who are interested in the study of maps in the head and the psychology of space. We live in space and space surrounds us. We interact with space all the time, consciously or unconsciously, and make decisions and actions based on our perceptions of that space. Have you ever wondered how some people navigate perfectly using maps in their heads while other people get lost even with a physical map? What do you mean when you say you have a poor "sense of direction"? How do we know where we are? How do we use and represent information about space? This book clarifies that our knowledge and feelings emerge as a consequence of our interactions with the surrounding space, and show that the knowledge and feelings direct, guide, or limit our spatial behavior and experience. Space matters, or more specifically space we perceive matters. Research into spatial cognition and experience, asking fundamental questions about how and why space and spatiality matters to humans, has thus attracted attention. It is no coincidence that the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for research into a positioning system in the brain or "inner GPS" and that spatial information and technology are recognized as an important social infrastructure in recent years. This is the first book aimed at graduate and advanced undergraduate students pursuing this fascinating area of research. The content introduces the reader to the field of spatial cognition and experience with a series of chapters covering theoretical, empirical, and practical issues, including cognitive maps, spatial orientation, spatial ability and thinking, geospatial information, navigation assistance, and environmental aesthetics.

The relationships between perception and imagery, imagery and spatial processes, memory and action: These are the main themes of this text The interest of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience on imagery and spatial cognition is remarkably increased in the last decades. Different areas of research contribute to the clarification of the multiple cognitive processes subserving spatial perception and exploration, and to the definition of the neurophysiological mechanisms underpinning these cognitive functions. The aim of this book is to provide the reader (post-graduate students as well as experts) with a complete overview of this field of research. It illustrates the way how brain, behaviour and cognition interact in normal and pathological subjects in perceiving, representing and exploring space. (Series B).

Multisensory Perception: From Laboratory to Clinic surveys the current state of knowledge on multisensory processes, synthesizing information from diverse streams of research and defining hypotheses and questions to direct future work. Reflecting the nature of the field, the book is interdisciplinary, comprising the findings and views of writers with diverse backgrounds and varied methods, including psychophysical, neuroanatomical, neurophysiological and neuroimaging approaches. Sections cover basic principles, specific interactions between the senses, the topic of crossmodal correspondences between particular sensory attributes, the related topic of synesthesia, and the clinic. Offers a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of the current state of knowledge on multisensory processes Coverage includes basic principles, specific interactions between the senses, crossmodal correspondences and the clinical aspects of multisensory processes Includes psychophysical, neuroanatomical, neurophysiological and neuroimaging approaches

This edited collection presents the latest cutting-edge research in the philosophy and cognitive science of temporal illusions. Illusion and error have long been important points of entry for both philosophical and psychological approaches to understanding the mind. Temporal illusions, specifically, concern a fundamental feature of lived experience, temporality, and its relation to a fundamental feature of the world, time, thus providing invaluable insight into investigations of the mind and its relationship with the world. The existence of temporal illusions crucially challenges the naïve assumption that we can simply infer the temporal nature of the world from experience. This anthology gathers eighteen original papers from current leading researchers in this subject, covering four broad and interdisciplinary topics: illusions of temporal passage, illusions and duration, illusions of temporal order and simultaneity, and the relationship between temporal illusions and the cognitive representation of time.