Glyn W. Humphreys

In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts themselves present career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, and their major practical theoretical contributions. Glyn Humphreys is an internationally renowned cognitive neuropsychologist with research interests covering object recognition and its disorders, visual word recognition, object and spatial attention, the effects of action on cognition, and social cognition. Within the field of Psychology he has won a number of prestigious awards, including the Spearman Medal, the President’s Award of the British Psychological Society, and the Donald Broadbent Prize from the European Society for Cognitive Psychology. This collection reflects the different directions in his work and approaches which have been adopted. It will enable the reader to trace key developments in cognitive neuropsychology in a period of rapid change over the last thirty years. A newly written introduction contextualises the selection in relation to changes in the field during this time. Attention, Perception and Action will be invaluable reading for students and researchers in visual cognition, cognitive neuropsychology and vision neuroscience.

In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts themselves present career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, and their major practical theoretical contributions. Glyn Humphreys is an internationally renowned cognitive neuropsychologist with research interests covering object recognition and its disorders, visual word recognition, object and spatial attention, the effects of action on cognition, and social cognition. Within the field of Psychology he has won a number of prestigious awards, including the Spearman Medal, the President’s Award of the British Psychological Society, and the Donald Broadbent Prize from the European Society for Cognitive Psychology. This collection reflects the different directions in his work and approaches which have been adopted. It will enable the reader to trace key developments in cognitive neuropsychology in a period of rapid change over the last thirty years. A newly written introduction contextualises the selection in relation to changes in the field during this time. Attention, Perception and Action will be invaluable reading for students and researchers in visual cognition, cognitive neuropsychology and vision neuroscience.

BORB provides a set of standardised procedures for assessing neuropsychological disorders of visual object recognition, based on tests developed in the cognitive neuropsychological literature. The tests are introduced in terms of cognitive neuropsychological analyses of object recognition, and guidance is given concerning test use and interpretation. The tests assess low-level aspects of visual perception (using same-different matching of basic perceptual features, such as orientation, length, position and object size), intermediate visual processes (e.g., matching objects different in viewpoint), access to stored perceptual knowledge about objects (object decision), access to semantic knowledge (function and associative matches) and access to names from object (picture naming). BORB will serve as an invaluable companion test battery to the PALPA test of language ability.

Vision allows us to do many things. It enables us to perceive a world composed of meaningful objects and events. It enables us to track those events as they take place in front of our eyes. It enables us to read. It provides accurate spatial information for actions such as reaching for or avoiding objects. It provides colour and texture that can help us to separate objects from their background, and so forth. This book is concerned with understanding the processes that allow us to carry out these various visually driven behaviours. In the past ten years our understanding of visual processing has undergone a rapid change, primarily fostered by the convergence of computational, experimental and neuropsychological work on the topic. Visual Cognition provides the first major attempt to cover all aspects of this work within a single text. It provides a summary of research on visual information processing, relevant to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and research workers. It covers: seeing static forms, object recognition, dynamic vision (motion perception and visual masking), visual attention, visual memory, visual aspects of reading. For each topic, the relevant computational, experimental and neuropsychological work is integrated to provide a broader coverage than that of other texts.