Tutorials In Visual Cognition

In the late-1980s, visual cognition was a small subfield of cognitive psychology, and the standard texts mainly discussed just iconic memory in their sections on visual cognition. In the subsequent two decades, and especially very recently, many remarkable new aspects of the processing of brief visual stimuli have been discovered -- change blindness, repetition blindness, the attentional blink, newly-discovered properties of visual short-term memory and of the face recognition system, the influence of reentrant processing on visual perception, and the surprisingly intimate relationships between eyeblinks and visual cognition. This volume provides up-to-date tutorial reviews of these many new developments in the study of visual cognition written by the leaders in the discipline, providing an incisive and comprehensive survey of research in this dynamic field.

In the late-1980s, visual cognition was a small subfield of cognitive psychology, and the standard texts mainly discussed just iconic memory in their sections on visual cognition. In the subsequent two decades, and especially very recently, many remarkable new aspects of the processing of brief visual stimuli have been discovered -- change blindness, repetition blindness, the attentional blink, newly-discovered properties of visual short-term memory and of the face recognition system, the influence of reentrant processing on visual perception, and the surprisingly intimate relationships between eyeblinks and visual cognition. This volume provides up-to-date tutorial reviews of these many new developments in the study of visual cognition written by the leaders in the discipline, providing an incisive and comprehensive survey of research in this dynamic field.

These essays tackle some of the central issues in visual cognition, presenting experimental techniques from cognitive psychology, new ways of modeling cognitive processes on computers from artificial intelligence, and new ways of studying brain organization from neuropsychology, to address such questions as: How do we recognize objects in front of us? How do we reason about objects when they are absent and only in memory? How do we conceptualize the three dimensions of space? Do different people do these things in different ways? And where are these abilities located in the brain? While this research, which appeared as a special issue of the journal Cognition, is at the cutting edge of cognitive science, it does not assume a highly technical background on the part of readers. The book begins with a tutorial introduction by the editor, making it suitable for specialists and nonspecialists alike.

This textbook is for use in tutorials and seminars by psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science undergraduates studying cognition. The book complements standard course texts in cognition by providing a series of articles which emphasize particularly what we do not understand, rather than what we think we do. It considers a selection of problems and phenomena that remain mysterious despite years, decades or centuries of enquiry, and evaluates different approaches to these problems.; The topics discussed range from specific optical illusions to the nature of consciousness. Some of these unsolved problems provide a vehicle for reviewing different paradigms and shifts in the field over the 20th century. Each chapter also poses some of the remaining unanswered questions, suggesting directions for future enquiry.

Vision allows us to do many things. It enables us to perceive a world composed of meaningful objects and events. It enables us to track those events as they take place in front of our eyes. It enables us to read. It provides accurate spatial information for actions such as reaching for or avoiding objects. It provides colour and texture that can help us to separate objects from their background, and so forth. This book is concerned with understanding the processes that allow us to carry out these various visually driven behaviours. In the past ten years our understanding of visual processing has undergone a rapid change, primarily fostered by the convergence of computational, experimental and neuropsychological work on the topic. Visual Cognition provides the first major attempt to cover all aspects of this work within a single text. It provides a summary of research on visual information processing, relevant to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and research workers. It covers: seeing static forms, object recognition, dynamic vision (motion perception and visual masking), visual attention, visual memory, visual aspects of reading. For each topic, the relevant computational, experimental and neuropsychological work is integrated to provide a broader coverage than that of other texts.

This book provides a state-of-the-art review of high-level vision and the brain. Topics covered include object representation and recognition, category-specific visual knowledge, perceptual processes in reading, top-down processes in vision -- including attention and mental imagery -- and the relations between vision and conscious awareness. Each chapter includes a tutorial overview emphasizing the current state of knowledge and outstanding theoretical issues in the authors' area of research, along with a more in-depth report of an illustrative research project in the same area. The editors and contributors to this volume are among the most respected figures in the field of neuropsychology and perception, making the work presented here a standard-setting text and reference in that area.

Originally published in 1974, this volume presents seven detailed views of human information processing at the time. While no single volume can do justice to the breadth of the area, it was hoped that the present selections reflected both the content and methodological approaches currently used by experimental psychologists concerned with the issues and problems of human information processing. The organization of the book is simple, proceeding from the human performance end of the continuum, an overview of which is given in the first chapter. Successive chapters are progressively more concerned with human cognition, and the last chapter gives an overview of human cognition. The intervening chapters are devoted to more specific topics and yield a detailed portrait of the models, findings, and methodology of human information processing.

This eBook is a volume based on the “Eye Movements and Visual Cognition” Special Issue published in the journal Vision by MDPI and edited by Raymond Klein and Simon Liversedge. The eBook comprises 19 high-quality chapters that are original and topical works by leading academic figures in the field of human vision and visual cognition. In putting together the book, we aimed to provide an informative body of work to stimulate and foster useful intellectual exchange between individuals working on basic theoretical issues as well as on more applied aspects of vision and cognitive science. From the outset, we sought papers that provide concise and astute reviews of topics within this broad field. The present volume includes reviews that are narrative (critiquing and summarizing research on a topic), tutorial (with a focus on methods and findings), empirical (e.g., meta-analytic), and theoretically synthetic. The eBook also features chapters with new empirical content that resolves an undecided issue stemming from an evaluation of the literature. Finally, where possible, we also selected papers that bridge theoretical and applied issues and provide insight into behavior and its neural substrate. All chapters were subject to peer review and went through several rounds of revision prior to acceptance.