Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological structure from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations – that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection in human evolution. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology. Some evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking to psychology, arguing that the modularity of mind is similar to that of the body and with different modular adaptations serving different functions. These evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.
The mind is the set of faculties including cognitive aspects such as consciousness, imagination, perception, thinking, intelligence, judgement, language and memory, as well as noncognitive aspects such as emotion and instinct. Under the scientific physicalist interpretation, the mind is produced at least in part by the brain. The primary competitors to the physicalist interpretations of the mind are idealism, substance dualism, and types of property dualism, and by some lights eliminative materialism and anomalous monism. There is a lengthy tradition in philosophy, religion, psychology, and cognitive science about what constitutes a mind and what are its distinguishing properties.
Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.
Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. William James (1890) wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence." Attention has also been described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources. Attention is manifested by an attentional bottleneck, in term of the amount of data the brain can process each second; for example, in human vision, only less than 1% of the visual input data can enter the bottleneck, leading to inattentional blindness.
Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind due to lesions in their striate cortex, also known as the primary visual cortex or V1, to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see.
Computational neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematical models, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand the principles that govern the development, structure, physiology and cognitive abilities of the nervous system.
The visual system comprises the sensory organ and parts of the central nervous system which gives organisms the sense of sight as well as enabling the formation of several non-image photo response functions. It detects and interprets information from the optical spectrum perceptible to that species to "build a representation" of the surrounding environment. The visual system carries out a number of complex tasks, including the reception of light and the formation of monocular neural representations, colour vision, the neural mechanisms underlying stereopsis and assessment of distances to and between objects, the identification of particular object of interest, motion perception, the analysis and integration of visual information, pattern recognition, accurate motor coordination under visual guidance, and more. The neuropsychological side of visual information processing is known as visual perception, an abnormality of which is called visual impairment, and a complete absence of which is called blindness. Non-image forming visual functions, independent of visual perception, include the pupillary light reflex (PLR) and circadian photoentrainment.
Béla Julesz was a Hungarian-born American visual neuroscientist and experimental psychologist in the fields of visual and auditory perception.
David J. Heeger is an American professor of psychology and neural science at New York University whose research spans a cross-section of engineering, psychology, and neuroscience.
Geraint Ellis Rees FMedSci is Dean of the UCL Faculty of Life Sciences, UCL Pro-Vice-Provost (AI) and a Professor of Cognitive Neurology at University College London. He is also a Director of UCL Business and a trustee of the charities the Guarantors of Brain and in2science
The salience of an item is the state or quality by which it stands out from its neighbors. Saliency detection is considered to be a key attentional mechanism that facilitates learning and survival by enabling organisms to focus their limited perceptual and cognitive resources on the most pertinent subset of the available sensory data.
Flash suppression is a phenomenon of visual perception in which an image presented to one eye is suppressed by a flash of another image presented to the other eye.
Jonathon Stevens "Jon" Driver was a psychologist and neuroscientist. He was a leading figure in the study of perception, selective attention and multisensory integration in the normal and damaged human brain.
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) constitute the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for a specific conscious percept. Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correlates of subjective phenomena; that is, neural changes which necessarily and regularly correlate with a specific experience. The set should be minimal because, under the assumption that the brain is sufficient to give rise to any given conscious experience, the question is which of its components is necessary to produce it.
Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment using light in the visible spectrum reflected by the objects in the environment. This is different from visual acuity, which refers to how clearly a person sees. A person can have problems with visual perceptual processing even if they have 20/20 vision.
Visual adaptation is the temporary change in sensitivity or perception when exposed to a new or intense stimulus, and the lingering afterimage that may result when the stimulus is removed. These continuous small adjustments reflect the neural coding process of the visual system, and exist so the brain can attempt to "normalize" the visual experience.
The Troland Research Awards are an annual prize given by the United States National Academy of Sciences to two researchers in recognition of psychological research on the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. The areas where these award funds are to be spent include but are not limited to areas of experimental psychology, the topics of sensation, perception, motivation, emotion, learning, memory, cognition, language, and action. The award preference is given to experimental work with a quantitative approach or experimental research seeking physiological explanations.
Due to the effect of a spatial context or temporal context, the perceived orientation of a test line or grating pattern can appear tilted away from its physical orientation. The tilt illusion (TI) is the phenomenon that the perceived orientation of a test line or grating is altered by the presence of surrounding lines or grating with a different orientation. And the tilt aftereffect (TAE) is the phenomenon that the perceived orientation is changed after prolonged inspection of another oriented line or grating.
Christopher F. Chabris is an American research psychologist, currently Senior Investigator (Professor) at Geisinger Health System, Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France, and Associate Professor of Psychology and co-director of the Neuroscience Program at Union College in Schenectady, New York. He is best known as the co-author of the popular science book The Invisible Gorilla, which presents the results of research into attention and other cognitive illusions.
The snake detection theory suggests that snakes have contributed to the evolution of primates' visual system. According to the hypothesis, predatory pressure from snakes has selected individuals who are better able to recognize them, improving their survival chances and therefore transferring such skill to their offspring. From this point of view, snakes were responsible for the modification and expansion of primate visual systems which made vision the most developed sensory interface with the external environment for modern primates. In her book, anthropologist Lynne Isbell writes that snakes evolved to be difficult to detect and mortally dangerous. Surviving the peril of snakes for millions of years required selective pressure favoring primates' specialized visual systems. Compared to that of other mammals, the pulvinar region of the brain – which helps to visually detect relevant objects – is disproportionately large and effective in the brains of primates.
