Books in the Elements in Perception series

This Element is for researchers seeking to understand visual attentional breadth. It critically considers the conceptualisation, measurement, and manipulation of attentional breadth, and how changing breadth impacts perceptual performance. The Element reviews the current 'state of the art', and provides useful frameworks for shaping future science.

This Element focuses on new knowledge about linkages between color vision genetics and color perception variation, and the color perception consequences of inheriting alternative, non-normative, forms of genetic sequence variation.

This Element looks at the physiological and social roles of taste and the proximal chemical senses. It explores how we perceive food and people when we contact them, and the influence of taste in food choice, metabolism. The impact of taste and the proximal chemical senses in emotion and social interactions is also examined.

Interactions between the senses are essential for cognitive functions. Past research helped understanding of multisensory processes in the laboratory, but efforts to extrapolate findings to the real-world are scarce. This Element discusses research that uncovers multisensory interactions under complex environments.

Examines local-level representational properties to illuminate the storage format of working memory content, as well as systems-level and brain network communication properties to illuminate the attentional processes controlling working memory. It also integrates both cognitive and neuroscientific accounts in a multi-level network architecture.

In this Element laboratory studies on crossmodal attention are situated within the applied context of driving. The conditions favoured by laboratory research, typically using a few paradigms involving simplified experimental conditions, is contrasted with multisensory, real-world environments filled with complex, intrinsically-meaningful stimuli.

This Element examines visual perception in the context of activities that involve moving about in complex, dynamic environments. A central theme is that the ability of humans and other animals to perceive their surroundings based on vision is profoundly shaped by the need to adaptively regulate locomotion to variations in the environment.

Proposes a framework in which it is assumed that visual selection is the result of the interaction between top-down, bottom-up and selection-history factors. Also discussed are top-down attentional engagement and suppression, bottom-up selection by abrupt onsets and static singletons as well as lingering biases due to selection-history.

In this Element, we review literature on the physiological influences of music during perception and action. We outline how acoustic features of music influence physiological responses during passive listening, and then consider specific behavioural contexts in which physiological responses to music impact perception and performance.

Explores the interaction between perception and experience by studying perceptual experts, people who specialize in recognizing objects such as birds, automobiles, dogs. We propose perceptual expertise promotes a downward shift in object recognition where experts recognize objects in their domain of expertise at a more specific level than novices.

Hypothesis testing is a common statistical analysis for empirical data generated by studies of perception, but its properties and limitations are widely misunderstood. This Element describes several properties of hypothesis testing, with special emphasis on analyses common to studies of perception. The author also describes the challenges and difficulties with using hypothesis testing to interpret empirical data. Many common applications of hypothesis testing inflate the intended Type I error rate. Other aspects of hypothesis tests have important implications for experimental design. Solutions are available for some of these difficulties, but many issues are difficult to deal with.