Essays
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Attention and Perception - Rensink, Ronald A.
This essay discusses several key issues concerning the study of attention and its relation to visual perception, with an emphasis on behavioral and experiential aspects. It begins with an overview of several classical works carried out in the latter half of the twentieth century, such as the development of early filter and spotlight models of attention. This is followed by a survey of subsequent research that extended or modified these results in significant ways. It includes work on various forms of induced blindness and on the capabilities of nonattentional processes. It also covers proposals about how a “just‐in‐time” allocation of attention can create the impression that we see our surroundings in coherent detail everywhere, as well as how the failure of such allocation can result in various perceptual deficits. The final section examines issues that have not received much consideration to date, but that may be important for new lines of research in the near future. These include the prospects for a better characterization of attention, the possibility of more systematic computational explanations, factors that may significantly modulate attentional operation, and the possibility of several kinds of visual attention and visual experience. -
Speech Perception - Vouloumanos, Athena
Speech perception is the process by which listeners presented with a distribution of audible frequencies modulated in amplitude (loudness) and spectral (the frequency set) content across time turn this sound into a coherent unit of perception that is interpreted as language. Classic studies established that speech is not perceived by simply mapping sets of invariant acoustic properties onto different speech sounds. In fact, speech perception is robust even when the acoustic signal has been dramatically distorted. Current approaches focus on understanding how we perceive speech by investigating the neural basis of processing different physical aspects of the speech signal, the encoding of acoustic information in the speech signal at different time scales, the developmental of speech perception, and the multimodal representation of speech. Understanding how humans perceive speech will require the expertise of psychologists, neuroscientists, and engineers.