Human object recognition is a classical topic both for philosophy and for the natural sciences. Ultimately, understanding of object recognition will be promoted by the cooperation of behavioral research, neurophysiology, and computation. This original book provides an excellent introduction to the issues that are involved. It contains chapters that address the ways in which humans and machines attend to, recognize, and act toward objects in the visual environment.

Human object recognition is a classical topic both for philosophy and for the natural sciences. Ultimately, understanding of object recognition will be promoted by the cooperation of behavioral research, neurophysiology, and computation. This original book provides an excellent introduction to the issues that are involved. It contains chapters that address the ways in which humans and machines attend to, recognize, and act toward objects in the visual environment.

This monograph presents a complete computational system for visual attention and object detection. VOCUS (Visual Object detection with a Computational attention System) represents a major step forward on integrating data-driven and model-driven information into a single framework. Additionally, the volume contains an extensive review of the literature on visual attention, detailed evaluations of VOCUS in different settings, and applications of the system.

Human beings experience a world of objects: bounded entities that occupy space and persist through time. Our actions are directed toward objects, and our language describes objects. We categorize objects into kinds that have different typical properties and behaviors. We regard some kinds of objects – each other, for example – as animate agents capable of independent experience and action, while we regard other kinds of objects as inert. We re-identify objects, immediately and without conscious deliberation, after days or even years of non-observation, and often following changes in the features, locations, or contexts of the objects being re-identified. Comparative, developmental and adult observations using a variety of approaches and methods have yielded a detailed understanding of object detection and recognition by the visual system and an advancing understanding of haptic and auditory information processing. Many fundamental questions, however, remain unanswered. What, for example, physically constitutes an “object”? How do specific, classically-characterizable object boundaries emerge from the physical dynamics described by quantum theory, and can this emergence process be described independently of any assumptions regarding the perceptual capabilities of observers? How are visual motion and feature information combined to create object information? How are the object trajectories that indicate persistence to human observers implemented, and how are these trajectory representations bound to feature representations? How, for example, are point-light walkers recognized as single objects? How are conflicts between trajectory-driven and feature-driven identifications of objects resolved, for example in multiple-object tracking situations? Are there separate “what” and “where” processing streams for haptic and auditory perception? Are there haptic and/or auditory equivalents of the visual object file? Are there equivalents of the visual object token? How are object-identification conflicts between different perceptual systems resolved? Is the common assumption that “persistent object” is a fundamental innate category justified? How does the ability to identify and categorize objects relate to the ability to name and describe them using language? How are features that an individual object had in the past but does not have currently represented? How are categorical constraints on how objects move or act represented, and how do such constraints influence categorization and the re-identification of individuals? How do human beings re-identify objects, including each other, as persistent individuals across changes in location, context and features, even after gaps in observation lasting months or years? How do human capabilities for object categorization and re-identification over time relate to those of other species, and how do human infants develop these capabilities? What can modeling approaches such as cognitive robotics tell us about the answers to these questions? Primary research reports, reviews, and hypothesis and theory papers addressing questions relevant to the understanding of perceptual object segmentation, categorization and individual identification at any scale and from any experimental or modeling perspective are solicited for this Research Topic. Papers that review particular sets of issues from multiple disciplinary perspectives or that advance integrative hypotheses or models that take data from multiple experimental approaches into account are especially encouraged.

Handbook of Object Novelty Recognition, Volume 26, synthesizes the empirical and theoretical advances in the field of object recognition and memory that have occurred since the development of the spontaneous object recognition task. The book is divided into four sections, covering vision and perception of object features and attributions, definitions of concepts that are associated with object recognition, the influence of brain lesions and drugs on various memory functions and processes, and models of neuropsychiatric disorders based on spontaneous object recognition tasks. A final section covers genetic and developmental studies and gender and hormone studies. - Details the brain structures and the neural circuits that underlie memory of objects, including vision and olfaction - Provides a thorough description of the object novelty recognition task, variations on the basic task, and methods and techniques to help researchers avoid common pitfalls - Assists researchers in understanding all aspects of object memory, conducting object novelty recognition tests, and producing reliable, reproducible results

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.

Although attention, perception and memory are identifiable components of the human cognitive system, this book argues that for a complete understanding of any of them it is necessary to appreciate the way they interact and depend on one another. Using close examination of experiments, studies of patients and evidence from cognitive neuroscience, each of these important areas in cognitive psychology is explored in detail and related to its counterparts. Written by an established author, Attention, Perception and Memory: An Integrated Introduction explains clearly the evolution and meaning of key terminology and assumptions and puts the different approaches to this field in context.