Gary Hatfield examines theories of spatial perception from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and provides a detailed analysis of the works of Kant and Helmholtz, who adopted opposing stances on whether central questions about spatial perception were amenable to natural-scientific treatment. At stake were the proper understanding of the relationships among sensation, perception, and experience, and the proper methodological framework for investigating the mental activities of judgment, understanding, and reason issues which remain at the core of philosophical psychology and cognitive science. Hatfield presents these important issues as living philosophies of science that shape and are shaped by actual research programs, creating a complex and fascinating picture of the entire nineteenth-century battle between nativism and empiricism. His examination of Helmholtz's work in physiological optics and epistemology is a tour de force. Gary Hatfield is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

"In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of representational mind: perception. Focusing on its form, function, and underlying capacities, as indicated in the sciences of perception, Burge provides an account of the representational content and formal representational structure of perceptual states, and develops a formal semantics for them. The account is elaborated by an explanation of how the representational form is embedded in an iconic format. These structures are then situated in current theoretical accounts of the processing of perceptual representations, with an emphasis on the formation of perceptual categorizations. An exploration of the relationship between perception and other primitive capacities-conation, attention, memory, anticipation, affect, learning, and imagining-clarifies the distinction between perceiving, with its associated capacities, and thinking, with its associated capacities. Drawing on a broad range of historical and contemporary research, rather than relying on introspection or ordinary talk about perception, Perception: First Form of Mind is a scientifically rigorous and agenda-setting work in the philosophy of perception and the philosophy of science"--

If you were told that we perceive the world directly without the causal intervention of the physical brain, or that we see the distant stars instantaneously without their light having to reach our sense organs, would the idea sound incredible to you? Farfetched as it may seem, this idea, the author argues, comes from the time-tested contact theory of perception. Upheld by the Indian philosophical tradition for over 2000 years, it unfolds a definitively coherent process of perception, unlike the stimulus-response theory of perception espoused by empirical science which suffers from a host of logical inconsistencies. The contact theory of perception is a paradigm-changing theory and it has the potential to take us to a domain of knowledge beyond science and to cause a radical transformation in the way we look at the universe we live in. Although a serious philosophical work, the language and lucid style of the presentation should appeal to a wide spectrum of people - from academic philosophers to curious aspirants. If philosophy or the philosophical traditions of India interests you, you cannot afford to ignore this book. But be forewarned: it will challenge the deep-rooted ideas that have become integral to your personal consciousness!

Vision is our most dominant sense, from which we derive most of our information about the world. From the light that enters the eye and the processing in the brain that follows we can sense where things are, how they move and what they are. The first edition of Visual Perception took a refreshingly different approach to perception, starting from the function that vision serves for an active observer in a three-dimensional environment. This fully revised and expanded new edition continues this approach in contrast to the traditional textbook treatment of vision as a catalogue of phenomena. Following a general introduction to the main theoretical approaches, the authors discuss the historical basis of our current knowledge. Placing the study of vision in its historical context, they look at how our ideas have been shaped by art, optics, biology and philosophy as well as psychology. Visual optics and the neurophysiology of vision are also described. The core of the book covers the perception of location, motion and object recognition. There is a new chapter on representation and vision, including a section on the perception of computer generated images. This readable, accessible and truly relevant introduction to the world of perception aims to elicit both independent thought and further study. It will be welcomed by students of visual perception and those with a general interest in the mysteries of vision.

The book consists of nine chapters dealing with the interaction of speech perception and phonology. Rather than accepting the common assumption that perceptual considerations influence phonological behaviour, the book aims to investigate the reverse direction of causation, namely the extent to which phonological knowledge guides the speech perception process. Most of the chapters discuss formalizations of the speech perception process that involve ranked phonological constraints. Theoretical frameworks argued for are Natural Phonology, Optimality Theory, and the Neigbourhood Activation Model. The book discusses the perception of segments, stress, and intonation in the fields of loanword adaptation, second language acquisition, and sound change. The book is of interest to phonologists, phoneticians and psycholinguists working on the phonetics-phonology interface, and to everybody who is interested in the idea that phonology is not production alone.

Why do video games fascinate kids so much that they will spend hours pursuing a difficult skill? Why don't they apply this kind of intensity to their school work? In their most penetrating and important work in years, these two leaders in the field of brain-based education build a bridge to the future of education with a dynamic model of teaching that works for all grade levels and in all cultural and ethnic groups. The authors' education model, the "Guided Experience Approach," is based on the way that biologists see learning as a totally natural, continuous interaction between perception and action. Natural Learning for a Connected World provides a practical, step-by-step description and successful examples from practice of this perception action cycle so that we can finally provide the learning environments essential for our children to thrive in the knowledge age.

The world of perception is multisensory. Even a simple task such as judging the position of a light in a dark room depends not only on vision but also on sensory signals about the position of our body in space. Likewise, how we experience food depends on sensory signals originating from the mouth, but also from nose signals, and even vision and hearing. However, traditional books on perception still discuss each of the " separately. This book takes a different stance: it defines perception as intrinsically multisensory from the start and examines multisensory interactions as key process behind how we perceive our own body, control its movements, perceive and recognise objects, respond to edible objects, perceive space, and perceive time. In addition, the book discusses multisensory processing in synaesthesia, multisensory attention, and the role of multisensory processing in learning. As an introduction to multisensory perception, this book is essential reading for students in psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience at the advanced undergraduate to postgraduate levels. As the chapters address topics that are often left out of standard textbooks, this book will also serve as a useful reference for specialist perception scientists and clinicians. Finally, as a monograph understandable to the educated non-specialist this book will also be of interest to professionals who need to take into account multisensory processing in domains such as, for instance, physiotherapy, neurological rehabilitation, human-computer interfaces, marketing, or the design of products and services.