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This book provides an up-to-date and accessible overview of the hottest and most influential contemporary debates in philosophy of perception, written especially for this volume by many of the most important philosophers of the field. The book addresses the following key questions: Can perception be unconscious? What is the relation between perception and attention? What properties can we perceive? Are perceptual states representations? How is vision different from the other sense modalities (like hearing or smell)? How do these sense modalities interact with one another? Contributors are Ned Block, Berit Brogaard, Alex Byrne, Robert Kentridge, John Kulvicki, Heather Logue, Mohan Matthen, Bence Nanay, Matt Nudds, Casey O’Callaghan, Adam Pautz, Ian Phillips, Susanna Siegel and Wayne Wu.
The empirical study of consciousness is in constant progress. New ideas and approaches arise, methods are being debated and refined, and experimental research over the last two decades has produced a rich body of data, acquired in the aim to better understand consciousness and its neural underpinnings. This volume synthesises this data, focusing on how to understand the relations and transitions between consciousness and unconsciousness alongside exploring and distinguishing conscious experience of sensory stimuli and unconscious states. Bringing together leading academics and promising young scientists from across the fields of psychology and neuroscience, Transitions between Consciousness and Unconsciousness discusses controversial topics and ideas, providing an overview of current research trends and opinions, as well as perspectives on theoretical and methodological questions. This is an essential volume for consciousness researchers and students from across psychology, neuroscience and philosophy, as well as those researching modes of visual processing.
To what level are invisible stimuli processed by the brain in the absence of conscious awareness? It is widely accepted that simple visual properties of invisible stimuli are processed; however, the existence of higher-level unconscious processing (e.g., involving semantic or executive functions) remains a matter of debate. Several methodological factors may underlie the discrepancies found in the literature, such as different levels of conservativeness in the definition of “unconscious” or different dependent measures of unconscious processing. In this research topic, we are particularly interested in yet another factor: inherent differences in the amount of information let through by d...
We rely heavily on faces during social interactions. Humans possess the ability to recognise thousands of people very quickly and accurately without effort. The serious social difficulties that follow abnormalities of the face recognition system (i.e., prosopagnosia) strongly underline the importance of typical face skills in our everyday life. Over the last fifty years, research on prosopagnosia, along with research in the healthy population, has provided insights into the cognitive and neural features behind typical face recognition. This has also been achieved thanks to non-invasive neuroimaging techniques such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Electroencephalography (EEG),...
Unlike most natural colours that are based on pigment absorption, the striking iridescent and intense colouration of many butterflies, birds or beetles stems from the interaction of light with periodic sub-micrometer surface or volume patterns, so called “photonic structures”. These “structural colours” are increasingly well understood, but they are difficult to create artificially and exploit technologically. In this thesis the field of natural structural colours and biomimetic photonic structures is covered in a wide scope, ranging from plant photonics to theoretical optics. It demonstrates diffractive elements on the petal surfaces of many flowering plant species; these form the basis for the study of the role of structural colours in pollinator attraction. Self-assembly techniques, combined with scale able nanofabrication methods, were used to create complex artificial photonic structures inspired by those found in nature. In particular, the colour effect of a Papilio butterfly was mimicked and, by variation of its design motive, enhanced. All photonic effects described here are underpinned by state-of-the-art model calculations.
"Sustainability is crucial for the future of our societies. From a computing perspective, the challenge is to design IT artifacts that contribute to improving people's work and everyday life in a sustainable way, thereby also contributing to social and ecological sustainability. The book documents the experiences made by several leading research groups in Europe, North America and South Africa, describing their efforts to achieve sustainable design results, the difficulties that barred the way but also the strategies they adopted to achieve the goal of sustainability. The analysis of this rich empirical material helps thinking about how to more systematically address and possibly overcome th...
A study that goes beyond the debate over functional specialization to describe the ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The idea that a specific brain circuit constitutes the emotional brain (and its corollary, that cognition resides elsewhere) shaped thinking about emotion and the brain for many years. Recent behavioral, neuropsychological, neuroanatomy, and neuroimaging research, however, suggests that emotion interacts with cognition in the brain. In this book, Luiz Pessoa moves beyond the debate over functional specialization, describing the many ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The amygdala is often viewed as ...
There is an emergent movement of scientists and scholars working on somatic awareness, interoception and embodiment. This work cuts across studies of neurophysiology, somatic anthropology, contemplative practice, and mind-body medicine. Key questions include: How is body awareness cultivated? What role does interoception play for emotion and cognition in healthy adults and children as well as in different psychopathologies? What are the neurophysiological effects of this cultivation in practices such as Yoga, mindfulness meditation, Tai Chi and other embodied contemplative practices? What categories from other traditions might be useful as we explore embodiment? Does the cultivation of body ...
Movements of the Mind is about what it is to be an agent. Focusing on mental agency, it integrates multiple approaches, from philosophical analysis of the metaphysics of agency to the activity of neurons in the brain. Philosophical and empirical work are combined to generate concrete explanations of key features of the mind. The book should be relevant and accessible to philosophers and scientists interested in mind and agency. Wu argues that actions have a core psychological structure where attention plays a necessary role in guiding the agent's response and intentions function as memory for work, a practical memory. Attention and memory are accordingly central parts of an agent's intention...
Brain-mind problems like consciousness have been stimulating the interest of philosophers and scientists since the ancient times. In the last decades, the dramatic development of neuroscience has allowed studying such phenomena at several different levels – from single neurons to behavior. Binocular rivalry, a paradigm dissociating the sensory input from the conscious perception during dichoptic viewing of incongruent images, has been a celebrated example of such a tool. During the last century, empirical research on binocular rivalry contributed the first important insights into the neuronal mechanisms of subjective visual perception. Recent advances in brain imaging and electrophysiologi...