Bücher der Reihe Elements in Perception

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.

In this review, we will present recent advances in how scene processing occurs within a few seconds of exposure, how scene information is retained in the long-term, and how different tasks affect attention in scene processing.

Even the simplest social interactions require us to gather, integrate, and act upon, multiple streams of information about others and our surroundings. In this Element, we discuss how perceptual processes provide us with an accurate account of action-relevant information in social contexts.

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.