Clarifies the complex concept of selective attention - how the brain is able to select information form the vast amount available to it - and provides a clear and explicit theory of central importance to psychologists.

Clarifies the complex concept of selective attention - how the brain is able to select information form the vast amount available to it - and provides a clear and explicit theory of central importance to psychologists.

The early years of modern experimental psychology were marked by a considerable amount of research on attention, and much work was carried out in the laboratories of Wundt, Titchener and Helmholtz. For various reasons, research on attention declined from 1920 until the 1950s. Under the early philosophy of behaviourism, attention became suspect as a ‘mentalistic’ concept. At the time of original publication in 1969, however, much work had been done to quantify and make objective research in this area. This was of increasing importance in a world dominated by communication networks, and ‘man-machine’ systems, in which the human element is the weakest link due to the limits on the rate at which man can handle information. Following the publication of Broadbent’s Perception and Communication in 1958, work on attention had begun to pour from an ever increasing number of laboratories. This book is dedicated to summarising what we knew, and attempts to survey the behavioural research in vision and hearing which throw light on how we share and direct attention, what are the limits of attention, to make some general methodological recommendations, to review current theories of the time, and to provide a guide to the relevant physiological work. As far as possible, work on memory has been omitted. A bibliography of the major work to the spring of 1969 is included.

This volume is not an attempt to give a comprehensive treatment of the many facets of intelligence. Rather, the intention is to present multiple approaches to interesting and novel ways of looking at old problems. The focus is on the visual and some of the conceptual intelligences. Vision is man's primary cognitive contact with the world around him, and we are vividly reminded of this by Roman Jakobson's autobiographical note, "The Evasive Initial" with which this volume begins. That we see the world as well as we do is something of a miracle. Looking out through our eyes, our brains give us reliable knowledge about the world around us in all it beauty of form, color and movement. The chapters in the first section look at how this may come about from various perspectives. How from the intensity array which the world casts on the eye's retina does the brain achieve recognition? What may be some of the processes involved in seeing? We see shapes, textures and colors, and subsequently, at the more cognitive levels, recognize them as objects which we can manipulate: we inspect them to discover what to use them for. The objects are tools or food; they are things, beautiful, lovable or frightening. They are things to remember and to talk about to our friends, or to ask someone for. We can ask for many or just a few. They are important to us or trivial.

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

Attention in Vision is an important work which aims to identify, address and solve some major problems and issues in the psychology of visual perception, attention and intentional control. The central aim is to investigate how people use their visual perception in the performance of tasks and to explore how the intentional control of action is achieved. Through an extensive review of the philosophy of psychology, the history of ideas and theories of intentional control, and an analysis of various tasks, a new theory is developed which argues that there is an important difference between report tasks and act tasks. The first section of the book introduces the issues of visual perception in a historical context and outlines van der Heijden's theory. The theory is developed in the second and third sections by analysing the findings from some of the main experimental paradigms of cognitive psychology and applying the theory to act tasks. Finally, the epilogue skilfully draws together the theory into an explanation of different historical and theoretical perspectives in psychology. This book will be invaluable to researchers and high-level undergraduates in the field of visual perception and attention.