An overview of knowledge about tactual-haptic perception.

First published in 1962, Bodily Sensations argues that bodily sensations are nothing but impressions that physical happenings are taking place in the body, impressions that may correspond or fail to correspond to physical reality. In the case of such sensations as pains, these impressions are accompanied by certain attitudes to the impressions. He argues, that is to say that bodily sensations are a sub-species of sense-impression, standing to perception of our own bodily state (or in some cases to touch) as visual impressions stand to the sense of sight. He examines, and tries to refute, all plausible alternative accounts of the nature of bodily sensations. He prefaces his argument by an account of tactual and bodily perception. Here he argues that, with the exception of heat and cold, the qualities discerned by these senses are all reducible to spatial and temporal properties of material objects. Combined with his own conclusions on bodily sensations, this allows him to draw up a short and exhaustive list of the so-called "secondary" qualities of physical objects. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy.

The purpose of the book is to provide a comprehensive overview of hemispheric differences in sensory and perceptual processing. The first section of the book deals directly with the intra- and inter-hemispheric processing of spatial and temporal frequencies in the visual modality. The second section addresses the initial interaction between sensory and cognitive mechanisms, dealing with how the left and right cerebral hemispheres differ in their computation and representation of sensory information. The third section covers how attentional mechanisms modulate the nature of perceptual processing in the cerebral hemispheres. Section four consists of a single chapter which reviews evidence suggesting a functional linkage between upper and right visual field processing, on the one hand, and lower and left visual field processing on the other.