Cognitive Contributions to the Perception of Spatial and Temporal Events

The book is concerned with the cognitive contributions to perception, that is, with the influence of attention, intention, or motor processes on performances in spatial and temporal tasks. The chapters deal with fundamental perceptual processes resulting from the simple localization of an object in space or from the temporal determination of an event within a series of events.
Chapters are based on presentations given at the Symposium on the Cognitive Contributions to the Perception of Spatial and Temporal Events (September 7–9, 1998, Ohlstadt, Germany). Following each chapter are commentary pieces from other researchers in the field. At the meeting, contributors were encouraged to discuss their theoretical positions along with presenting empirical results and the book's commentary sections help to preserve the spirit and controversies of the symposium.
The general topic of the book is split into three parts. Two sections are devoted to the perception of unimodal spatial and temporal events; and are accompanied by a third part on spatio-temporal processes in the domain of intermodal integration.

The themes of the book are highly topical. There is a growing interest in studies both with healthy persons and with patients that focus on localization errors and dissociations in localizations resulting from different tasks. These errors lead to new concepts of how visual space is represented. Such deviations are not only observed in the spatial domain but in the temporal domain as well. Typical examples are errors in duration judgments or synchronization errors in tapping tasks. In addition, several studies indicate the influence of attention on both the timing and on the localization of dynamic events. Another intriguing question originates from well-known interactions between intermodal events, namely, whether these events are based on a single representation or whether different representations interact.

Part and chapter headings: Cognitive Contributions to the Perception of Spatial Events a) Action-Oriented Views. Separate Representations of Visual Space for Perception and Visually Guided Behavior (B. Bridgeman). On the Perception of Position (A.H.C. Van der Heijden et al.). Space Perception and Intended Action (P. Wolff). Cognition and Spatial Perception: Production of Output or Control of Input? (J. Scott Jordan). Motor Determinants of a Unified World Perception (J. Paillard). How Independent from Action Control is Perception? An Event-Coding Account for More Equally-Ranked Crosstalks (J. Müsseler). Cognitive Contributions to the Perception of Spatial Events b) Attention-Oriented Views. Effects of Attention on Length Perception, Gap Detection and Visual Localization. Towards a Theory of Attentional Receptive Fields (Yehoshua Tsal). Twelve Spatiotemporal Phenomena and One Explanation (T. Bachman). Cognitive Contributions to the Perception of Temporal Events. Perceived Timing of Self-Initiated Actions (P. Haggard). Action Timing in an Isochronous Tapping Task. Evidence from Behavioral Studies and Neuroimaging (K. Müller et al.). Reaction Time and Temporal-Order Judgment as Measures of Perceptual Latency: The Problem of Dissociations (P. Jaśkowski). Task-Dependent Timing of Perceptual Events (G. Aschersleben). 40-Hz-Synchronicity Priming of Kanizsa-Figure Detection Demonstrated by a Novel Psychophysical Paradigm (H.J. Müller, M.A. Elliott). Cognitive Contributions to the Perception of Intermodal Events. Ventriloquism: A Case of Crossmodal Perceptual Grouping (P. Bertelson). Meaning, Attention, and the "Unity Assumption" in the Intersensory Bias of Spatial and Temporal Perceptions (R.B. Welch). The Development of Temporal and Spatial Intermodal Perception (D.J. Lewkowicz). Seeing Cries and Hearing Smiles: Crossmodal Perception of Emotional Expressions (B. de Gelder et al.). Indexes.