The big question in the science of psychology is: Why is human cognition and behavior so different from the capabilities of every other animal species on Earth - including our close genetic relations, the chimpanzees? This book provides a coherent answer by examining those aspects of the human brain that have made triadic forms of perception and cognition possible. Mechanisms of dyadic association sufficiently explain animal perception, cognition, and behavior but a three-way associational mechanism is required to explain the human talents for language, tool-making, harmony perception, pictorial depth perception, and the joint attention that underlies all forms of social cooperation.

This book addresses the difference between the mental processes of animals and those of the human mind.

This volume represents the first which interfaces with astronomy as the fulcrum of the sciences. It gives full expression to the human passion for the skies. Advancing human civilization has unfolded and matured this passion into the comprehensive science of astronomy. Advancing science’s quest for the first principles of existence meets the ontopoietic generative logos of life, the focal point of the New Enlightenment. It presents numerous perspectives illustrating how the interplay between human beings and the celestial realm has informed civilizational trends. Scholars and philosophers debate in physics and biology, the findings of which are opening a more inclusive, wider picture of the universe. The different models of the universal order and of life here presented, all aiming at the first principles of existence—accord with the phenomenology/ontopoiesis of life within the logos-prompted primogenital stream of becoming and action, which points to a future of progressing culture.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference of the 11th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, CMMR 2015, held in Plymouth, UK, in June 2015. The 30 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 126 submissions. This year’s post symposium edition contains peer-reviewed and revised articles centered around the conference theme “Music, Mind, and Embodiment”. It is divided into 6 sections devoted to various sound and technology issues with a particular emphasis on performance, music generation, composition, analysis and information retrieval, as well as relations between sound, motion and gestures and human perception and culture.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Music Technology with Swing, CMMR 2017, held in Matosinhos, Portugal, in September 2017. The 44 full papers presented were selected from 64 submissions. The papers are grouped in eight sections: music information retrieval, automatic recognition, estimation and classification, electronic dance music and rhythm, computational musicology, sound in practice: auditory guidance and feedback in the context of motor learning and motor adaptation, human perception in multimodal context, cooperative music networks and musical HCIs, virtual and augmented reality, research and creation: spaces and modalities.

How the perception of shadows, studied by vision scientists and visual artists, reveals the inner workings of the visual system. In The Visual World of Shadows, Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh examine how the perception of shadows, as studied by vision scientists and visual artists, reveals the inner workings of the visual system. Shadows are at once a massive problem for vision—which must distinguish them from objects or material features of objects—and a resource, signaling the presence, location, shape, and size of objects. Casati and Cavanagh draw up an inventory of information retrievable from shadows, showing their amazing variety. They present an overview of the visual system, distinguishing between measurement and inference. They discuss the shadow mission, the work done by the visual brain to parse, and perhaps discard, the information from shadows; shadow ownership, the association of a shadow with the object that casts it; shadow labeling, the visual system's ability to tell shadows from nonshadows; and the shadow concept, our knowledge about shadows as a category. Casati and Cavanagh then apply the theoretical apparatus they have developed for shadows to other phenomena: illumination, reflection, and transparency. Finally, they examine the art of the shadow, paying tribute to artists' exploration of shadow, analyzing a series of artworks (reproduced in color) from a rich and fascinating art historical corpus.