Written by a distinguished psychologist, this book is an integrated treatment of the mathematical theory of human response times. Professor Luce provides a comprehensive, well-balanced, and clear review of the experimental data and puts forth the relevance of the hazard function, a novel and important approach he and his colleagues have developed. Since measurements of response times are widely used by experimental psychologists as one approach to distinguishing among theories of intellectual functioning, the conceptual arguments Professor Luce brings to bear on mathematical models of...

This book brings together recent research on the ability of human listeners to discern changes in the shape of complex acoustic spectra. It systematically discusses issues surrounding the discrimination of a change in acoustic intensity and the physiological mechanisms responsible for this process. The book also proposes two new theories which attempt to explain spectral shape discrimination on the basis of more elementary auditory processes. The research described here is helping scientists gain a better understanding of auditory skills such as those involved in listening to music and...

The visual system must extract from the light that falls on the retina meaningful information about what is where in our environment. At an early stage it analyzes the incoming sensory data along many dimensions of pattern vision, e.g. spatial frequency, orientation, velocity, eye-of-origin. Visual Pattern Analyzers provides a definitive account of current knowledge about this stage of visual processing. Nowhere else can such a comprehensive summarty of the lower level pattern analyzers be found. The book's emphasis is on psychophysical experiments measuring the detection and...

This monograph is based on 20 years of research with patients who have experienced pathology in one hemisphere of the brain. It deals with brain mechanisms in human communicative behavior, and with related motor functions, from a broadly biological point of view. In so doing, the work discusses the possible evolutionary origins of human communication, the relation of brain mechanisms in communicative behavior to analogous nonhuman behaviors, and the neural systems involved in various levels and kinds of communication. In addition, noncommunicative mechanisms which parallel those used in...

This work presents a systematic analysis of the psychological phenomena associated with the concept of mental representations--also referred to as cognitive or internal representations. A major restatement of a theory the author first developed in his 1971 book (Imagery and Verbal Processes), Mental Representation covers phenomena from the earlier period that remain relevant today but emphasizes cognitive problems and paradigms that have since emerged more fully. The author proposes that performance in memory and other cognitive tasks is mediated not only by linguistic...

Written by a distinguished psychologist, this book is an integrated treatment of the mathematical theory of human response times. Professor Luce provides a comprehensive, well-balanced, and clear review of the experimental data and puts forth the relevance of the hazard function, a novel and important approach he and his colleagues have developed. Since measurements of response times are widely used by experimental psychologists as one approach to distinguishing among theories of intellectual functioning, the conceptual arguments Professor Luce brings to bear on mathematical models of...

Based on Estes' important Fitts Lectures, this volume details a set of psychological concepts and principles that offers a unified interpretation of a wide variety of memory, categorization, and decision-making phenomena. These phenomena are explained via two families of models established by the author: a storage-retrieval model and an adaptive network model. Estes considers whether the models are competing or complementary, offering cogent and instructive arguments for both perspectives. Estes' theory is then applied to two large-scale series of studies on category learning and recognition,...

Based on Estes' important Fitts Lectures, this volume details a set of psychological concepts and principles that offers a unified interpretation of a wide variety of memory, categorization, and decision-making phenomena. These phenomena are explained via two families of models established by the author: a storage-retrieval model and an adaptive network model. Estes considers whether the models are competing or complementary, offering cogent and instructive arguments for both perspectives. Estes' theory is then applied to two large-scale series of studies on category learning and recognition,...

This book examines how people understand utterances that are intended figuratively. Traditionally, figurative language such as metaphors and idioms has been considered derivative from more complex than ostensibly straightforward literal language. Glucksberg argues that figurative language involves the same kinds of linguistic and pragmatic operations that are used for ordinary, literal language. Glucksberg's research in this book is concerned with ordinary language: expressions that are used in daily life, including conversations about everyday matters, newspaper and magazine articles, and...

This book presents the basic concepts of classical psychophysics, derived from Gustav Fechner, as seen from the perspective of modern measurement theory. The theoretical discussion is elucidated with examples and numerous problems, and solutions to one-quarter of the problems are provided in the text.