Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American professor of cognitive science whose research focuses on the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, won both the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and a National Book Award for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.
George P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that lives of individuals are significantly influenced by the central metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions in several scientific fields. The largest German association of research institutions, the Helmholtz Association, is named after him.
Cognitive linguistics (CL) is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from both psychology and linguistics. It describes how language interacts with cognition, how language forms our thoughts, and the evolution of language parallel with the change in the common mindset across time.
An autostereogram is a single-image stereogram (SIS), designed to create the visual illusion of a three-dimensional (3D) scene from a two-dimensional image. In order to perceive 3D shapes in these autostereograms, one must overcome the normally automatic coordination between accommodation (focus) and horizontal vergence. The illusion is one of depth perception and involves stereopsis: depth perception arising from the different perspective each eye has of a three-dimensional scene, called binocular parallax.
A mental image or mental picture is the representation in a person's mind of the physical world outside that person. It is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the experience of perceiving some object, event, or scene, but occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses. There are sometimes episodes, particularly on falling asleep and waking up (hypnopompic), when the mental imagery, being of a rapid, phantasmagoric and involuntary character, defies perception, presenting a kaleidoscopic field, in which no distinct object can be discerned. Mental imagery can sometimes produce the same effects as would be produced by the behavior or experience imagined.
Béla Julesz was a Hungarian-born American visual neuroscientist and experimental psychologist in the fields of visual and auditory perception.
William Ball "Will" Provine was an American historian of science and of evolutionary biology and population genetics. He was the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor at Cornell University and was a professor in the Departments of History, Science and Technology Studies, and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
In linguistics, a grammatical construction is any syntactic string of words ranging from sentences over phrasal structures to certain complex lexemes, such as phrasal verbs.
Random-dot stereogram (RDS) is stereo pair of images of random dots which when viewed with the aid of a stereoscope, or with the eyes focused on a point in front of or behind the images, produces a sensation of depth, with objects appearing to be in front of or behind the display level.
Cyclopean image is a single mental image of a scene created by the brain by combining two images received from the two eyes. The mental process behind construction of the Cyclopean image is crucial to stereo vision. Autostereograms take advantage of this process to trick the brain into forming an apparent Cyclopean image from seemingly random patterns.
Stereopsis is a term that is most often used to refer to the perception of depth and 3-dimensional structure obtained on the basis of visual information deriving from two eyes by individuals with normally developed binocular vision. Because the eyes of humans, and many animals, are located at different lateral positions on the head, binocular vision results in two slightly different images projected to the retinas of the eyes. The differences are mainly in the relative horizontal position of objects in the two images. These positional differences are referred to as horizontal disparities or, more generally, binocular disparities. Disparities are processed in the visual cortex of the brain to yield depth perception. While binocular disparities are naturally present when viewing a real 3-dimensional scene with two eyes, they can also be simulated by artificially presenting two different images separately to each eye using a method called stereoscopy. The perception of depth in such cases is also referred to as "stereoscopic depth".
The Implication-Realization (I-R) model of melodic expectation was developed by Eugene Narmour as an alternative to Schenkerian analysis centered less on music analysis and more on cognitive aspects of expectation. The model is one of the most significant modern theories of melodic expectation, going into great detail about how certain melodic structures arouse particular expectations.
Albert Borgmann is a German-born American philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of technology. He was born in Freiburg, Germany, and is a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana. In 2013 Borgmann received the Golden Eurydice Award.
Norman Henry Anderson is a social psychologist, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, where he was one of three founders of the Department of Psychology. He received a BS in 1946 and an MS in 1949 from the University of Chicago, and an MS in 1955 and a PhD in 1956 from the University of Wisconsin, with a thesis on Effect of First-order Conditional Probability in a Two-choice Learning Situation. Anderson also taught at The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) during the 1960s and 1970s, and is credited with developing Information Integration Theory.
Vibhuti Narain Rai is a police officer and author from India. He obtained an M.A. in English literature from Allahabad University in 1971 and joined the Indian Police Service in 1975 as a part of the Uttar Pradesh cadre. He served many sensitive districts as a superintendent of police.
Objectivity is a philosophical concept of being true independently from individual subjectivity caused by perception, emotions, or imagination. A proposition is considered to have objective truth when its truth conditions are met without bias caused by a sentient subject. Scientific objectivity refers to the ability to judge without partiality or external influence, sometimes used synonymously with neutrality.
Marc Bekoff is Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the co-founder, with Jane Goodall, of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society and a former Guggenheim fellow. He lectures internationally on animal behavior, cognitive ethology, and behavioral ecology, and writes a science column about animal emotion for Psychology Today.
Stereoscopic motion, as introduced by Béla Julesz in his book Foundations of Cyclopean Perception of 1971, is a translational motion of figure boundaries defined by changes in binocular disparity over time in a real-life 3D scene, a 3D film or other stereoscopic scene. This translational motion gives rise to a mental representation of three dimensional motion created in the brain on the basis of the binocular motion stimuli. Whereas the motion stimuli as presented to the eyes have a different direction for each eye, the stereoscopic motion is perceived as yet another direction on the basis of the views of both eyes taken together. Stereoscopic motion, as it is perceived by the brain, is also referred to as cyclopean motion, and the processing of visual input that takes place in the visual system relating to stereoscopic motion is called stereoscopic motion processing.
