Lynn Nadel

Mary A. Peterson

Luca Tommasi

In the past few decades, sources of inspiration in the multidisciplinary field of cognitive science have widened. In addition to ongoing vital work in cognitive and affective neuroscience, important new work is being conducted at the intersection of psychology and the biological sciences in general. This volume offers an overview of the cross-disciplinary integration of evolutionary and developmental approaches to cognition in light of these exciting new contributions from the life sciences. This research has explored many cognitive abilities in a wide range of organisms and developmental stages, and results have revealed the nature and origin of many instances of the cognitive life of organisms. Each section of this book deals with a key domain of cognition: spatial cognition; the relationships among attention, perception, and learning, representations of numbers and economic values; and social cognition. Contributors discuss each topic from the perspectives of psychology and neuroscience, brain theory and modeling, evolutionary theory, ecology, genetics, and developmental science.

Evolutionary and Developmental Perspectives on Mind, Brain, and Behavior

Cognitive Biology

Gillian Rhodes

From a barrage of photons, we readily and effortlessly recognize the faces of our friends, and the familiar objects and scenes around us. However, these tasks cannot be simple for our visual systems--faces are all extremely similar as visual patterns, and objects look quite different when viewed from different viewpoints. How do our visual systems solve these problems? The contributors to this volume seek to answer this question by exploring how analytic and holistic processes contribute to our perception of faces, objects, and scenes. The role of parts and wholes in perception has been studied for a century, beginning with the debate between Structuralists, who championed the role of elements, and Gestalt psychologists, who argued that the whole was different from the sum of its parts. This is the first volume to focus on the current state of the debate on parts versus wholes as it exists in the field of visual perception by bringing together the views of the leading researchers. Too frequently, researchers work in only one domain, so they are unaware of the ways in which holistic and analytic processing are defined in different areas. The contributors to this volume ask what analytic and holistic processes are like; whether they contribute differently to the perception of faces, objects, and scenes; whether different cognitive and neural mechanisms code holistic and analytic information; whether a single, universal system can be sufficient for visual-information processing, and whether our subjective experience of holistic perception might be nothing more than a compelling illusion. The result is a snapshot of the current thinking on how the processing of wholes and parts contributes to our remarkable ability to recognize faces, objects, and scenes, and an illustration of the diverse conceptions of analytic and holistic processing that currently coexist, and the variety of approaches that have been brought to bear on the issues.

Analytic and Holistic Processes

Perception of Faces, Objects, and Scenes

Barbara Gillam

H. A. Sedgwick

How can we best describe the processes by which we visually perceive our environment? Contemporary perceptual theory still lacks a coherent theoretical position that encompasses both the limitations on the information that can be retained from a single eye fixation and the abundant phenomenal and behavioral evidence for the perception of an extended and coherent world. As a result, many leading theorists and researchers in visual perception are turning with new or renewed interest to the work of Julian Hochberg. For over 50 years, in his own experimental research, in his detailed consideration of examples drawn from a wide range of visual experiences and activities, and most of all in his brilliant and sophisticated theoretical analyses, Hochberg has persistently engaged with the myriad problems inherent in working out the kind of coherent theoretical position the field currently lacks. The complexity of his thought and the wide range of areas into which Hochberg has pursued the solution to this central problem have, however, limited both the accessibility of his work and the appreciation of his accomplishment. In this volume we seek to bring the full range of Hochberg's work to the attention of a wider audience by offering a selection of his key works, many taken from out-of-print or relatively inaccessible sources. To facilitate the understanding of his accomplishment, and of what his work has to offer to contemporary researchers and theorists in visual perception, we include commentaries on salient aspects of his work by 20 noted researchers. In the Mind's Eye will be of interest to researchers working on topics such as perceptual organization, visual attention, space perception, motion perception, visual cognition, the relationship between perception and action, picture perception, and film, who are striving to obtain a deeper understanding of their own fields, and who want to integrate this understanding into a broader, unified view of visual perceptual processing.

Julian Hochberg on the Perception of Pictures, Films, and the World

In the Mind's Eye

Mary A. Peterson

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