Visual Masking

Our visual system can process information at both conscious and unconscious levels. Understanding the factors that control whether a stimulus reaches our awareness, and the fate of those stimuli that remain at an unconscious level, are the major challenges of brain science in the new millennium. Since its publication in 1984, Visual Masking has established itself as a classic text in the field of cognitive psychology. In the years since, there have been considerable advances in the cognitive neurosciences, and a growth of interest in the topic of consciousness, and the time is ripe for a new edition of this text. Where most current approaches to the study of visual consciousness adopt a 'steady-state' view, the approach presented in this book explores its dynamic properties. This new edition uses the technique of visual masking to explore temporal aspects of conscious and unconscious processes down to a resolution in the millisecond range. The 'time slices' through conscious and unconscious vision revealed by the visual masking technique can shed light on both normal and abnormal operations in the brain. The main focus of this book is on the microgenesis of visual form and pattern perception - microgenesis referring to the processes occurring in the visual system from the time of stimulus presentation on the retinae to the time, a few hundred milliseconds later, of its registration at conscious or unconscious perceptual and behavioural levels. The book takes a highly integrative approach by presenting microgenesis within a broad context encompassing visuo-temporal phenomena, attention, and consciousness.

Visual masking is a technique used in cognitive research to understand pre-conscious processes (priming, for example), consciousness, visual limits, and perception issues associated with psychopathology. This book is a short format review of research using visual masking: how it has been used, and what these experiments have discovered.Topics covered include concepts, varieties, and theories of masking; masking and microgenetic mechanisms and stagesof visual processing; psychopharmacological and genetic factors in masking, and more. Provides succinct information about the widely dispersed masking studies and points out some new trends in masking research Reviews transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) as an alternative to the traditional psychophysical masking methods Comments on the methodological pitfalls hidden in the practice of masking, helping to improve the quality of future research where masking is used as a tool Informs readers about recent developments in theoretical attempts to understand masking

Where most current approaches to the study of visual consciousness adopt a 'steady-state' view, the approach presented in this book explores its dynamic properties down to a resolution in the millisecond range."--BOOK JACKET.

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.

Section headings: Foreword; Introduction -- The Problem of Visual Masking; Facts and the Theories of Visual Masking; The Conception of Perceptual Retouch and its Experimental Control; The Psychophysiological Modelling from Short-Term Images; Conclusions.

Wavelet and subband transforms have been of great interest in the fields of - gineering and applied mathematics. The theories of these powerful signal p- cessing tools have matured and many applications utilizing them are emerging in different disciplines. This book, comprised of eleven chapter contributions from prominent researchers in the field, focuses on communications and mul- media applications of wavelet and subband transforms. The first six chapters of this book deal with a variety of communications applications that significantly benefit from wavelet and subband theories. S- ilarly, the remaining five chapters present recent advances in multimedia - plications of wavelet and subband transforms. These chapters interconnect the requirements of applications with the underlying theory and their engineering solutions. Hence, the reader can easily trace the entire path from fundamentals to the purpose and merit of application in hand. A combined list of references for the entire volume is given at the end of the text that should be helpful to the interested reader for a further study. This book is anticipated to be of particular interest to engineers and sci- tists who want to learn about state-of-the-art subband and wavelet transform applications as well as their theoretical underpinnings. It can also serve as a supplementary book for graduate level engineering and applied mathematics courses on wavelet and subband transforms.

This book gathers 14 original contributions published in an IJERPH Special Issue that deal with the perception of environmental sounds and how such sounds are likely to affect human quality of life and well-being and the experience of a place. The research focus over the years has been gradually shifting from treating sound simply as “noise” and something that cities should get rid of to a potential “resource” to promote and support community life in public spaces. Three main topics or “needs” to be addressed by researchers and practitioners emerged from this Special Issue: (1) the need to re-think “quietness” in cities as something that goes beyond the mere “pursuit of silence”, (2) the need to integrate additional contextual factors in the characterization and management of urban acoustic environments for public health, and (3) the need to consider the acoustic quality of indoor spaces as opposed to an outdoor-only perspective. The contributions collected in this book will hopefully trigger new questions and inform the agenda of future researchers and practitioners in the environmental acoustics domain.