A century ago phrenologists described a "bump" for color located just over the eyebrow. Today's modular approach to the organization of the visual cortex is more sophisticated, yet it still holds that there are brain areas dedicated solely to particular aspects of perception. "Cognition through Color "reviews the current status of investigations of color cognition from the standpoint of modern neuropsychology. It provides clear evidence, based on a large body of empirical study that includes the author's own work on color perception and naming, that color appears to be one of the basic building blocks or modules from which perception is constructed and our memories organized. Davidoff systematically relates this evidence to an explicit model of color cognition from sensation through functional role to naming.The original impetus for "Cognition through Color "came from the investigation of individuals with brain damage. There are, for example, patients who have difficulty in naming colors. More important, despite normal color vision, memory for colors can be "split off" from all aspects of memory for shapes and objects, providing a strong case for the notion of modularity in vision.Davidoff shows that to understand how color is remembered, we must know how objects are recognized. He observes that the perception of what we call color is, in essence, the study of the surface properties of objects, and he develops a model in which the mental representations for color can be linked to the knowledge of objects. Throughout he emphasizes detailed critical analysis of experimental data in light of current theories of both perception and cognition.

We perceive color everywhere and on everything that we encounter in daily life. Color science has progressed to the point where a great deal is known about the mechanics, evolution, and development of color vision, but less is known about the relation between color vision and psychology. However, color psychology is now a burgeoning, exciting area and this Handbook provides comprehensive coverage of emerging theory and research. Top scholars in the field provide rigorous overviews of work on color categorization, color symbolism and association, color preference, reciprocal relations between color perception and psychological functioning, and variations and deficiencies in color perception. The Handbook of Color Psychology seeks to facilitate cross-fertilization among researchers, both within and across disciplines and areas of research, and is an essential resource for anyone interested in color psychology in both theoretical and applied areas of study.

Explores the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of color lexicons.

Thompson provides an accessible review of the current scientific and philosophical discussions of colour vision and is vital reading for all cognitive scientists and philosophers whose interests touch upon this central area.Colour fascinates all of us, and scientists and philosophers have sought to understand the true nature of colour vision for many years. In recent times, investigations into colour vision have been one of the success stories of cognitive science, for each discipline within the field - neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence, and philosophy - has contributed significantly to our understanding of colour. Evan Thompson's book is a major contribution to this interdisciplinary project.Colour Vision provides an accessible review of the current scientific and philosophical discussions of colour vision. Thompson steers a course between the subjective and objective positions on colour, arguing for a relational account. This account develops a novel 'ecological' approach to colour vision in cognitive science and the philosophy of perception. It is vital reading for all cognitive scientists and philosophers whose interests touch upon this central area.

Draws on contemporary perceptual science to address metaphysical questions about color.

"This is a book for artists, but it is also for curators, art school faculty, landscape architects, gallerists, archivists, post-disciplinary multi-hyphenates, museum program staff, and anyone who wants to know about the ways art and congnitive science come together to engage an audience."--Cover

This volume provides an up to date and comprehensive overview of the philosophy and neuroscience movement, which applies the methods of neuroscience to traditional philosophical problems and uses philosophical methods to illuminate issues in neuroscience. At the heart of the movement is the conviction that basic questions about human cognition, many of which have been studied for millennia, can be answered only by a philosophically sophisticated grasp of neuroscience's insights into the processing of information by the human brain. Essays in this volume are clustered around five major themes: data and theory in neuroscience; neural representation and computation; visuomotor transformations; color vision; and consciousness.