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This chapter introduces the concept of integrated speech production and perception, and the roles of speaker and listener. Production is for perception, i.e., the speech waveform triggers perceptions in the mind of the listener. The relationship between biological responses to external events and cognitive interpretation of the internal reaction to events is described. The biological and cognitive contributions to expressive and emotive speech are presented, including an evaluation of current lines of research.

This chapter defines expressive speech as used in this book. The concept of a composite acoustic waveform is presented, consisting of two components: the basic message and expression. The speaker plans an utterance, a listener assigns labels to that utterance, and arrives at a percept which recovers the intended message. This differs from other models which do not emphasize the assignment of labels or symbolic representation to the waveform. Another difference is the proposal that speaking occurs within an overall expressive wrapper. Short term and long term expression is discussed and the role of the listener is emphasized.

This chapter discusses a study on preverbal inductive inferences. It provides not only clear evidence for conceptual categorization, but failure at some “basic-level” conceptual distinctions for which the object-examination test had provided positive evidence (such as differentiating dogs from cats at eleven months). A summary of differences between percepts and concepts in terms of different kinds of categories is presented.

This chapter presents data from psychophysical and physiological experiments that explored brightness perception and the possible involvement of filling-in. It begins with a discussion of psychophysical experiments that imply that there is a scale-dependent filling-in process always at work in the perception of lightness. This process is remarkably slow compared to feature detection, and it appears to be initiated near luminance-contrast boundaries. It then discusses physiological data that suggest that there is an explicit representation of lightness, not in the retina, but in visual cortex. Lightness-correlated activity in striate cortex appears to result from extensive inhibitory and facilitatory interactions from outside the small classical receptive fields.

This chapter develops the first of several linkages between economics, psychology, and neuroscience. First, it provides an overview of classical psychophysics. Second, it demonstrates that the mathematically described relationship between stimulus and percept can be mapped fairly directly to neurobiological models of sensory transduction. It provides examples of pre-existing conceptual reductions between psychology and neuroscience. Finally, it shows that one of these fully linked neurobiology-to-psychology concept groups can be relevant to economics. The chapter concludes by arguing that economic models of the random utility of directly consumable rewards are, in their present form, reducible to psychological models of percept and thence to neurobiological models of biochemical transduction.

This chapter sketches and argues for a view called the ‘representational theory of the visual mind’ (RTVM). RTVM is not so much a scientific theory that leads to testable predictions, as a picture or a framework. According to this theory, the mind is at bottom a representational device: in Dretske's terms, ‘all mental facts are representational facts’. In this view, mental processes consist of the formation and the transformation of mental representations. Section 2 contrasts RTVM with two alternatives: ‘sense-datum theory’ and ‘disjunctivism’. Section 3 presents reasons for thinking that visual percepts have non-conceptual content. Section 4 sketches the basis of an approach labelled as ‘cognitive dynamics’. Section 5 considers three implications of RTVM for the control of visually guided actions. It argues that RTVM has the resources to clarify the puzzle of visually guided actions. It examines the nature of actions and argues that actions involve mental representations.

Colors are psychological experiences (whose nature is not yet determined), as mentioned in the first chapter. Those experiences lack a close connection with color stimuli, therefore color order systems that are based on simple mathematical manipulation of cone absorption or color-matching function data cannot be expected to agree with average observer judgment data. As different from color stimulus or colorant order systems, perceptual color order systems must be based on judgments of psychologically important distances between color percepts. When trying to organize a massive collection of color samples in a systematic manner, the most significant aspect is hue. All psychological order systems agree on representing the hue attribute as a closed circle.

This chapter presents a faithful account of the musical thought that was present in the 1960s. It reflect the diverse ways in which some of the composers were searching for a new theoretical approach, motivated by a profound reaction against the attempts at explanation and the inflexible definitions that had been allowed to achieve the sanctity of divine law through the sheer inertia of almost everyone concerned with music. One can consider concept and percept as distinct from each other. The chapter examines the confusion between theorizing and creating instilled fear in “intuitive” composers, because they could think only in terms of one type of behavior arrogating the place of the other. It also put the practice of music criticism or of any writing on music in constant danger of being made too much of—that is, of being, used as an excuse to get rid of frustrated creative drives.

This chapter focuses on studies investigating blind people’s imagery abilities, including those that debate the ability of congenitally blind people to generate mental images through visual percepts. Studies supporting the fact that mental images cannot be generated by congenitally blind people on a visual percept basis are presented along with others contradicting them by stating that shape and texture can help blind people to create a mental image. Limitations, including representational and operational/processing deficits of blind individuals in imagery tasks, are explored. The chapter focuses on the role of working memory in creating mental imagery and the development of working memory in the absence of a visual sense.

This chapter is concerned with the putative difference between psychology and the physical sciences. Although this difference has been viewed as problematic for psychology, it is yet to be seen why this should be so. Also considered here are the Weber-Fechner laws, a paradigm of psychophysical respectability which claims that the intensity of a percept is a logarithmic function of the intensity of the stimulus. Such laws are well established by repeated experiments, are robust across many subjects, and take the form of a mathematical equation. In short, they have many of the hallmarks of respectable scientific results. It is not true, however, that the intensity of the percept is always related to that of the stimulus in the manner which they predict.

This chapter discusses the ordering of color percepts, and starts by presenting an overview of the critical issues surrounding the topic and by examining the relationship between stimuli and percepts. Certain types of variability were found by experimental psychology in the relationship between stimulus and response as a result of observation conditions. In the twentieth century, the view that the normal human color-vision system has a standard implementation and that all perceptual data are appropriately treated with normal statistical distribution methodology became the standard paradigm. However, the idea that the large number of color percepts humans can experience must fit into some kind of ordering system is an old one, going as far back to Aristotle and his proposed color categories based on a scale of chromatic colors between white and black. The strengths and limitations of the more recently developed kinds of color order systems are also touched upon here.

This chapter examines language and its origins in an effort to obtain an appreciation of its mechanisms. It starts with the important task of introducing and outlining the technicalities brought about by the word-percept linkage and the indication of its intrapsychic consequences. Before the breakthrough of language, a hemispheric symmetry was assumed that led to the evolution of dual representations, such as the perceptual and verbal representation of referents. Language introduces an asymmetry that calls for adaptation—one that can attend to both aspects of this asymmetry and achieve the integrated totalization of the disparities, melding the word and percept into one entity with a stable meaning. The mechanism that can satisfy these requirements is “attentional oscillation” between the inputs.

The discussion covers problems regarding consciousness as a trait. These revolve around the qualitative aspects of consciousness, specifically the ontological status of qualia. Qualia arethe subjective aspects of conscious experience, the primary qualities of visual perception such as color. The function that consciousness serves is often questioned. There are some philosophic approaches that give priority to consciousness as state, and other approaches that give priority to consciousness as trait. To these problematic issues are added the problem of determining how neural activities are linked to conscious experience, that is, of what constitutes the neural correlates or causes of consciousness. Stimulus-dependent, unconscious processing, and percept-dependent, conscious processing correlate with the initial feedforward neural sweep, and the activation of subsequent feedforward–reentrant processing loops playing out in the ventral cortical pathway. It raises a further issue regarding whether or not visual consciousness is globally unitary or a composite of several “microconsciousnesses.”

The distinction between seeing and knowing, and why our brains even bother to see, are discussed using vivid perceptual examples, including image features without visible qualia that can nonetheless be consciously recognized, The work of Helmholtz and Kanizsa exemplify these issues, including examples of the paradoxical facts that “all boundaries are invisible”, and that brighter objects look closer. Why we do not see the big holes in, and occluders of, our retinas that block light from reaching our photoreceptors is explained, leading to the realization that essentially all percepts are visual illusions. Why they often look real is also explained. The computationally complementary properties of boundary completion and surface filling-in are introduced and their unifying explanatory power is illustrated, including that “all conscious qualia are surface percepts”. Neon color spreading provides a vivid example, as do self-luminous, glary, and glossy percepts. How brains embody general-purpose self-organizing architectures for solving modal problems, more general than AI algorithms, but less general than digital computers, is described. New concepts and mechanisms of such architectures are explained, including hierarchical resolution of uncertainty. Examples from the visual arts and technology are described to illustrate them, including paintings of Baer, Banksy, Bleckner, da Vinci, Gene Davis, Hawthorne, Hensche, Matisse, Monet, Olitski, Seurat, and Stella. Paintings by different artists and artistic schools instinctively emphasize some brain processes over others. These choices exemplify their artistic styles. The role of perspective, T-junctions, and end gaps are used to explain how 2D pictures can induce percepts of 3D scenes.

This chapter concludes, summarizing key findings concerning prosodic weight and raising issues for further research. It compares three approaches to weight-sensitivity in phonology, namely, categorical mapping constraints (such as WEIGHT-TO-STRESS), phonetic discriminant analysis (which identifies optimal criteria), and direct phonetics–phonology interface approaches (such as $t$-to-Stress, where $t$ is a numerical weight percept). Advantages and pathologies of each approach are discussed, pointing towards a possible eventual synthesis. The chapter also includes sections treating the opacity of weight criteria, the domain of the weight percept (which is argued to include parts of onsets by way of p-centers), and the varying degrees of categoricity vs. gradience found in different types of phenomena, where the incidence of gradience tends to correlate with domain size.

This chapter discusses the “image of thought” in modern cinema, especially what Deleuze calls “the cinema of the brain.” Within the “machine” of cinema is a means of transcending the mechanisms of perception, opinion (common ideas, or views), and cliché in order to invent newer and finer articulations of the linkages between the human and the world (linkages that Deleuze would later call the creation “percepts and affects”). Modern cinema does this precisely by making use of stock conventions and habitual determinations“to pass through the net of determinations that have spread out” into a world (determinations of perception, opinion, character, etc.); however, it fashions its own conventions, which become doxa (opinion) as well—and there is always a danger that these forms will become too rigid and dominant.

As we move around a picture, the light pattern projecting from it to our eye changes. The resulting percept also changes, but the nature of these changes varies from picture to picture. The contents of the picture may appear to remain parallel to the picture plane as it slants away from us, or they may undergo changes in their apparent shape and/or their orientation relative to the picture plane. The changes are a function of the geometry of the retinal projection competing with parallax cues to flatness. Here, a bathtub in a photo undergoes a radical shape change—from long and skinny to short and stubby—as we change our viewpoint.

Artists, designers, photographers, and visual scientists are routinely looking for ways to create, out of a single image, the feeling that there is more to see than what meets the eye. Many well-known visual illusions are dual in nature, causing the viewer to experience two different interpretations of the same image. Hybrid images illustrate a double-image illusion, where different images are perceived depending on viewing distance, viewing duration, or image size: one that appears when the image is viewed up-close (displaying high spatial frequencies) and another that appears from afar (showing low spatial frequencies). This method can be used to create compelling dual images in which the observer experiences different percepts when interacting with the image.