The Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision begins by introducing the reader to the anatomy of the eye and visual cortex and then proceeds to discuss image and representation, face recognition, printed word recognition, visual sematic memory and visual attention and perception. 1. Early Vision.

2. From Local To Global Image Representation.

3. The Problem Of Visual Recognition.

4. Object Recognition.

5. Face Recognition.

6. Word Recognition.

7. Visual Attention.

8. Hemispatial Neglect.

9. Mental Imagery.

10. Visual Awareness.

"This is an outstanding overview of an exciting frontier of research on the mind. Farah has a gift for ingenious and original syntheses of complicated research topics, which makes this book an invaluable resource for anyone interested in how the brain lets us see," Steven Pinker, Professor, MIT, and author of How the Mind Works and Words and Rules

"Farah’s book gives a comprehensive account of the cognitive neuroscience of vision, filtered through the judgment and enlivened by the comments of one of its best-known contributors. An excellent and lively survey to interest and inform both students and researchers." Anne Treisman, Princeton University

Martha J. Farah is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a former Guggenheim Fellow and carries out research on higher cortical functions. In this clear and engagingly written book, Martha Farah presents the first comprehensive overview of the cognitive neuroscience of vision.

Beginning with the transformation of light images into neural images within the eye, Farah traces the processing of the visual signal throughout the brain, culminating in our conscious awareness of the objects and people we see. The perception of colour, motion, faces, printed words, and other important components of our visual world are explained, along with the related cognitive processes of visual attention and visual mental imagery.

Each chapter brings together a fascinating array of clinical anecdotes and observations, data from physiological experiments, and the latest neuroimaging studies of the normal brain at work. The unprecedented integration of the different stages of visual perception and the different approaches to these stages will be of value to students and specialists alike.