Fitting the Mind to the World

Adaptation and After-Effects in High-Level Vision

Colin W. G. Clifford and Gillian Rhodes

Advances in Visual Cognition 2

376 pages | numerous line drawings, halftones and colour plates | 234x156mm

978-0-19-852969-9 | Hardback | 05 May 2005

Price: £75.00

This item is printed to order and supplied on a firm sale basis. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.

Add to Wish List

The first book in many years on this topic, providing vision scientists with new, cutting edge research demonstrating the role of adaptation in perception
The second volume in the 'Advances in Visual Cognition' series, a dynamic, high profile series dedicated to presenting the best work in the visual and cognitive sciences

Adaptation phenomena provide striking examples of perceptual plasticity and offer valuable insight into the mechanisms of visual coding. The technique of psychophysical adaptation has aptly been termed the psychologist's microelectrode because of its usefulness in investigating the coding of sensory information in the human brain. Its broader relevance though is illustrated by the increasing use of adaptation to study more cognitive aspects of vision such as the mechanisms of face perception and the neural substrates of visual awareness.

This book brings together a collection of studies from international researchers, which demonstrate the brain's remarkable capacity to adapt its representation of the visual world in response to changes in its environment. A major theme throughout is that adaptation at all stages of visual processing serves a functional role in the efficient representation of the prevailing visual environment. Information about the visual world is coded in the rate at which neurons fire. However, neurons can only respond over a certain range of firing rates. Adaptation of the way in which neurons code visual information tends to make optimal use of this limited response range. Though these principles are well established at the level of light adaptation in the retina, it is only relatively recently that researchers have started to look for analogous behaviour at the higher levels of the visual system. This book is the first to bring together evidence that adaptation in high-level vision, as at the lower levels, serves to fit the mind to the world.

Readership: Psychologists and neuroscientists in the vision sciences from graduate level upwards

Colin W. G. Clifford, School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Australia, and Gillian Rhodes, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

Link to AUTHOR'S home page

Contributors:
David Alais, Department of Physiology, University of Sydney, Australia; Derek H. Arnold, Department of Psychology, University College London, UK; Randolph Blake, Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA; Igor Bondar, Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology, Moscow, Russia; Colin Clifford, School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Australia; David J. Field, Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA; Kalanit Grill-Spector, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, USA; Sheng He, Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA; Michael R. Ibbotson, Centre for Visual Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; Emma Jacquet, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; Linda Jeffery, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; Zoe Kourtzi, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany; David A. Leopold, Unit of Cognitive Neurophysiology and Imaging, National Institutes for Health, Bethesda, USA; Elinor McKone, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; Gillian Rhodes, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; Rachel Robbins, School of Psychology, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; Satoru Suzuki, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA; Frans A. J. Verstraten, Helmholtz Research Institute, Utrecht University, The Netherlands; Nicholas J. Wade, Department of Psychology, University of Dundee, UK; Michael A. Webster, Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, USA; John S. Werner, Department of Ophthalmology, University of California Davis, Sacramento, USA; David Whitney, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada; Qasim Zaidi, SUNY College of Optometry, New York, USA

Fitting the Mind to the World

Adaptation and After-Effects in High-Level Vision

Share