Download or read book Bodies Actions and the Structure of Experience written by Stephen Flusberg and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychologists have traditionally treated perception and action as separate mental faculties, but an emerging view suggests that we perceive the world in terms of how it affords action, and that there is significant overlap in the cognitive representations supporting perceptual and motor processes. However, there are a number of open questions regarding the scope and breadth of this perspective. I addressed this issue in three series of experiments designed to illuminate how our everyday physical experiences in the environment can influence, organize, and constrain our perceptual and cognitive processes. If perception and action are dynamically linked in experience, do they become dynamically linked in the mind as well? In a first set of studies I asked just how deeply our motor experiences penetrate into our perceptual processes. Can action representations qualitatively affect what objects we see? In Experiments 1-3, participants viewed an action hand prime followed by an ambiguous image, and they were biased to perceive an object that was congruent with (i.e. afforded the same action as) the primed action. In Experiment 4, participants engaged in a real motor action while viewing the ambiguous image. In this case they were biased to perceive an object that was incongruent with the motor action being carried out. This is the first evidence for a qualitative effect of action representation on object perception. The specific pattern of results helps constrain possible underlying mechanisms, strongly suggesting that the same representations support both our ability to perceive and plan an action towards an object. These findings suggest that our physical motor experiences with objects shapes our ability to perceive those objects. Do these physical encounters also constrain our ability to imagine those objects? Participants in Experiment 5 were slower to mentally rotate an object that was harder to physically rotate when they engaged in motor imagery. This effect disappeared when they used visual imagery, however. This suggests that our physical motor experiences with an object do constrain our ability to imagine manipulating that object, but that we can loosen these constraints by flexibly adopting an alternative imagery strategy. Do we only represent the relationships between action and perception when we actively engage with an object (e.g. pick it up or move it), or are we more generally sensitive to the contingent relationships between our body movements and the structure of the perceptual information we have access to? For example, do we represent how our body position relates to the spatial orientation of objects in the world? To address this issue, I note that in our everyday experiences, faces tend to appear upright with respect to both our eyes (egocentric reference frame) and the world (environmental reference frame). Further, our movements and body positioning give us access to both types of orientation information. In Experiments 6-11, participants performed face-processing tasks as they lay horizontally, which served to disassociate the egocentric and environmental frames. The results revealed large effects of egocentric orientation on performance and smaller but reliable effects of environmental orientation. This suggests that we are sensitive to how our body movements co-vary with the spatial structure of the visual information we have access to. I conclude by suggesting that bidirectional effects of action on perception may be a natural consequence of well-established psychological principles, such as the power of statistical learning. Central to this argument is the realization that our bodies and actions help create the very structure of the world that we experience. This suggests that to fully understand any given perceptual or cognitive ability we need to take the role of embodied experience seriously.
Download or read book The Body Keeps the Score written by Bessel A. Van der Kolk and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.
Download or read book Understanding Events written by Thomas F. Shipley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-02-25 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We effortlessly recognize all sorts of events--from simple events like people walking to complex events like leaves blowing in the wind. We can also remember and describe these events, and in general, react appropriately to them, for example, in avoiding an approaching object. Our phenomenal ease interacting with events belies the complexity of the underlying processes we use to deal with them. Driven by an interest in these complex processes, research on event perception has been growing rapidly. Events are the basis of all experience, so understanding how humans perceive, represent, and act on them will have a significant impact on many areas of psychology. Unfortunately, much of the research on event perception--in visual perception, motor control, linguistics, and computer science--has progressed without much interaction. This volume is the first to bring together computational, neurological, and psychological research on how humans detect, classify, remember, and act on events. The book will provide professional and student researchers with a comprehensive collection of the latest research in these diverse fields.
Download or read book How the Body Shapes the Mind written by Shaun Gallagher and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2006-10-12 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioural expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states. Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgement, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way?
Download or read book Mind from Body written by Don M. Tucker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-25 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Mind from Body, Don Tucker, one of the most original thinkers about organic information processing, provides a fascinating analysis of how our brains have become what they are today and speculates intriguingly about what they could be tomorrow. He presents important research that explains how personal experience creates the emotional and motivational bases of each of our thoughts, even though we are usually not aware that it is happening. Tucker shows that in exploring how these bodily thought processes still determine how we react to the world andmake decisions, we can become more rational
Download or read book Development and Structure of the Body Image written by S. Fisher and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1986. First published in 1986. This is volume 1 of two, of Development and Structure of the Body Image. This Volume presents a thorough review and analysis of the body image literature from 1969. The bibliography for all the work described in the two volumes is contained in this second volume.
Download or read book The Structure of Conscious Experience written by Lee Roy Beach and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There must exist a point at which the molecular and electro-chemical processes that comprise brain function are transformed into rich, orderly conscious experience which seamlessly blends the present moment, what led up to it, and what will follow it. This is the stuff of our everyday lives, and it raises questions about its organization and how that organization facilitates engagement with the world at large. In short, what is the structure of conscious experience and what is gained by it being structured that way? This book argues that the structure is what is familiarly known as narrative form and that the gain is the ability to communicate about one’s experience with oneself and others, as well as to make informed predictions about what will happen in the fundamentally unknowable and potentially dangerous future. In the latter case, because the essence of narrative form is time and causality, structuring events from memory (the past) and from perception (the present) in narrative form causally implies future events (expectations). The potential threat (the bad or the absence of good) of these expected future events can be assessed, and, if required, action can be taken to prevent their occurrence or to diminish their impact. The implications about thinking and action, and about who we are as individuals, are also discussed here.
Download or read book The Structure of Perceptual Experience written by James Stazicker and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative new collection features six original essays exploring the spatial, temporal, and other structures that shape conscious perception. Includes cutting-edge research on an increasingly influential topic in the philosophy of the mind Explores structural differences between the senses and between different theories of perceptual experience Offers innovative new arguments on the philosophy of perception written by leading scholars in the field
Download or read book Body and World written by Samuel Todes and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001-04-27 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Body and World is the definitive edition of a book that should now take its place as a major contribution to contemporary existential phenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical nature and experience are united in our bodily action. His account allows him to preserve the authority of experience while avoiding the tendency towards idealism that threatens both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Todes emphasizes the complex structure of the human body; front/back asymmetry, the need to balance in a gravitational field, and so forth; and the role that structure plays in producing the spatiotemporal field of experience and in making possible objective knowledge of the objects in it. He shows that perception involves nonconceptual, but nonetheless objective forms of judgment. One can think of Body and World as fleshing out Merleau-Ponty's project while presciently relating it to the current interest in embodiment, not only in philosophy but also in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and anthropology. Todes's work opens new ways of thinking about problems such as the relation of perception to thought and the possibility of knowing an independent reality; problems that have occupied philosophers since Kant and still concern analytic and continental philosophy.
Download or read book Husserl written by David Woodruff Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition of David Woodruff Smith’s stimulating introduction to Husserl has been fully updated and includes a new ninth chapter featuring contemporary issues confronting Husserl’s phenomenology. It introduces the whole of Edmund Husserl’s thought, demonstrating his influence on philosophy of mind and language, on ontology and epistemology, as well as ethical theory, and on philosophy of logic, mathematics, and science. Starting with an overview of Husserl’s life and works, and his place in twentieth-century philosophy and in Western philosophy as a whole, Smith introduces Husserl’s conception of phenomenology, explaining Husserl’s innovative theories of intentionality, objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. In subsequent chapters Smith covers Husserl’s logic, metaphysics, realism and transcendental idealism, epistemology, and (meta)ethics. Finally, the author assesses the significance and implications of Husserl’s work for contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Also included is a timeline, glossary, and extensive suggestions for further reading, making Husserl, second edition, essential reading for anyone interested in phenomenology, twentieth-century philosophy, and the continuing influence of this eminent philosopher.
Download or read book Knowing Bodies Moving Minds written by Liora Bresler and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to define new theoretical, practical, and methodological directions in educational research centered on the role of the body in teaching and learning. Based on our phenomenological experience of the world, it draws on perspectives from arts-education and aesthetics, as well as curriculum theory, cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology. These are arenas with a rich untapped cache of experience and inquiry that can be applied to the notions of schooling, teaching and learning. The book provides examples of state-of-the-art, empirical research on the body in a variety of educational settings. Diverse art forms, curricular settings, educational levels, and cultural traditions are selected to demonstrate the complexity and richness of embodied knowledge as they are manifested through institutional structures, disciplines, and specific practices.
Download or read book Writing and the Body in Motion written by Cheryl Pallant and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-04-15 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based upon the author's lifetime practices as a dancer, poet and teacher, this innovative approach to developing body awareness focuses on achieving self-discovery and well-being through movement, mindfulness and writing. Written from a holistic (rather than dualistic) view of the mind-body duality, discussion and exercises draw on dance, psychology, neuroscience and meditation to guide personal exploration and creative expression.
Download or read book The Body written by ??·?? and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores mind-body philosophy from an Asian perspective. It sheds new light on a problem central in modern Western thought. Yuasa shows that Eastern philosophy has generally formulated its view of mind-body unity as an achievement a state to be acquired--rather than as essential or innate. Depending on the individual's own developmental state, the mind-body connection can vary from near dissociation to almost perfect integration. Whereas Western mind-body theories have typically asked what the mind-body is, Yuasa asks how the mind-body relation varies on a spectrum from the psychotic to the yogi, from the debilitated to the athletic, from the awkward novice to the master musician. Yuasa first examines various Asian texts dealing with Buddhist meditation, kundalini yoga, acupuncture, ethics, and epistemology, developing a concept of the "dark consciousness" (not identical with the psychoanalytic unconscious) as a vehicle for explaining their basic view. He shows that the mind-body image found in those texts has a striking correlation to themes in contemporary French phenomenology, Jungian psychoanalysis, psychomatic medicine, and neurophysiology. The book clears the ground for a provocative meeting between East and West, establishing a philosophical region on which science and religion can be mutually illuminating.
Download or read book Body Work written by Sylvia K. Blood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are scientific 'facts' about body image enough to define conceptions of normality? Reassessing Experimental Psychology from a critical perspective, Sylvia Blood demonstrates how its research into Body Image can be misused and prone to misuse. Classifying women who experience distress and anxiety with food, eating and body size as suffering 'body image disturbance' or 'body image dissatisfaction', it can reproduce dominant assumptions about language, meaning and subjectivity. Experimental psychology's discourse about body image has recently become more widely influential, becoming popularised through domains such as women’s magazines, in which psychological experts provide 'facts' about women's 'body image problems', and offer advice and psychological treatments. With acute cross-disciplinary awareness Body Work: The Social Construction of Women's Body Image exposes the assumptions at work in the methods and status of experimental approaches. Penetrating beyond the usual dichotomy between experimental and popular psychology, this book illuminates some of the ways in which women's magazines have embraced experimental psychology's treatment of the issue. Drawing on her experience in Clinical Psychology, Sylvia Blood highlights the damaging effects of uncritically experimental views of body image. She goes on to elaborate not only an alternative model of discursive construction but also the implications of such a theory for clinical practice. Merging theory and clinical experience, Sylvia Blood exposes the fallacies about women’s bodies that underpin experimental psychology's body image research. She demonstrates the dangerous consequences of these fallacies being accepted as truths in popular texts and in the talk of 'everyday' women.
Download or read book The Body in Crisis written by Christine Greiner and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Body in Crisis introduces the English-speaking world to the work of leading Latin American dance scholar and philosopher of the body, Christine Greiner. The book offers an innovative set of tools with which to examine the role of moving bodies and bodily actions in relation to worldwide concerns, including identity politics, alterity, migration, and belonging. The book places the concept of bodymedium in dialogue with the work of Giorgio Agamben to investigate notions of alterity, and shows how an understanding of the body-environment continuum can shed light on things left unnamed and at the margins. Greiner’s analyses draw from a broad range of theory concerned with the epistemology of the body, including cognitive science, political philosophy, evolutionary biology, and performance studies to illuminate radical experiences that question the limits of the body. Her analysis of the role that bodies play in negotiations of power relations offers an original and unprecedented contribution to the field of dance studies and expands its scope to recognize theoretical models of inquiry developed in the Global South.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness written by Philip David Zelazo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
Download or read book Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development written by Usha Goswami and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2002-10-21 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This definitive volume provides state-of-the-art summaries of current research by leading specialists in different areas of cognitive development. Forms part of a series of four Blackwell Handbooks in Developmental Psychology spanning infancy to adulthood. Covers all the major topics in research and theory about childhood cognitive development. Synthesizes the latest research findings in an accessible manner. Includes chapters on abnormal cognitive development and theoretical perspectives, as well as basic research topics. Now available in full text online via xreferplus, the award-winning reference library on the web from xrefer. For more information, visit www.xreferplus.com
