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 book addresses the central problem of music cognition: how listeners' responses move beyond mere registration of auditory events to include the organization, interpretation, and remembrance of these events in terms of their function in a musical context of pitch and rhythm. Equally important, the work offers an analysis of the relationship between the psychological organization of music and its internal structure. Combining over a decade of original research on music cognition with an overview of the available literature, the work will be of interest to cognitive and physiological...

In this survey of our current knowledge concerning the cognitive psychology of music, the author--a psychologist and practicing musician--examines the mental processes involved in composing, performing, listening to, and "understanding" music, and shows how such skills are acquired.

Although the last 50 years have witnessed a rapid growth in the understanding of vowel articulation and acoustics, most contemporary theories of speech perception have concentrated on consonant perception. Authored by leading academic and industrial authorities, this volume is intended to balance such a bias. The authors propose a computational theory of auditory vowel perception that accounts for vowel identification in the face of acoustic differences between speaker, speaking rate, stress. Topics include: acoustic and auditory effects of articulation, vowel categorization, and vowel...

Ranging from behavioral to molecular levels of analysis, this informative study presents the results of recent research into the biochemistry and neural mechanisms of imprinting. Horn discusses some of the difficulties that researchers have encountered in analyzing the neural basis of memory and describes ways in which these difficulties have been overcome through the analysis of memories underlying habituation and imprinting. He also considers the biochemical consequences of imprinting and its cerebral localization, and examines the relationships between human and animal memory.

This book provides the first general and unified theory of visual discomfort. Based on the author's observation that people find certain visual stimuli uncomfortable--and that these same stimuli induce seizures in patients with photosensitive epilepsy--the book offers fascinating insights into a variety of visual stresses that arise from design, reading, lighting, television, and VDU terminals. A range of techniques for preventing and treating visual discomfort--from color therapy to precision tinting of spectacle lenses--are described in detail. Students and researchers in perceptual...

Traditional theories of associative learning have found no place for the possibility that an individual's perception of events might change as a result of experience. Evidence for the reality of perceptual learning has come from procedures unlike those studied by learning theorists. The work reviewed in this book shows that learned changes in perceptual organization can in fact be demonstrated, even in experiments using procedures (such as conditioning and simple discrimination learning) which form the basis of associative theories. These results come from procedures that have been the focus...

This book offers a concise but detailed introduction to controversial field of sensation measurement. It presents the most important argumen ts in the field, plus a comprehensive survey of the data to allow read ers to form their own opinions on the debate.

What is it about human brains that make some people more capable than others? In an authoritative and critical account, Professor Ian Dreary reviews historical, cognitive, and biological research on the foundations of human mental ability. Where most previous accounts of intelligence have examined how human mental ability can predict success in education, work, and social life, few books have taken as a starting point mental ability (and individual differences in intelligence), and attempted to see what factors could have influenced, and have even predicted mental ability. This book reveals...

One of the most dramatic areas of development in early human life is that of vision. Whereas vision plays a relatively minor role in the world of the newborn infant, by six months it has assumed the position as a dominant sense and forms the basis of later perceptual, cognitive, and social development.
From a world leader in the study of visual development in human infants comes a major new book, condensing a lifetime of work in this area. Drawing on over 20 years of cutting edge research in the Visual Development Units in Cambridge and University College, London, this book provides the...