Affordances
The concept of affordances was introduced by psychologist James J. Gibson as the primary entities that animals, including non-human animals, perceive. For example, rather than perceiving a solid, well-supported surface with an area of approximately 750 cm, approximately 45 cm off the floor, or even
Attention
When agents pay attention, they do so selectively across modalities of mind such as perception and cognition. For example, they visually search for a friend in a crowd to signal to them or interpret a painting by scrutinizing it. They listen to an interlocutor to understand what is being said or sec
Hearing
Hearing, also known as audition, is a modality of sensory perception in which one detects and differentiates things and features in the environment by transducing and extracting information from pressure waves by means of a dedicated sense organ such as the ears. While the study of sense perception
Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness
Higher-order theories of consciousness seek to explain what it is for a mental state to be conscious. In particular, they seek to explain how mental states that are conscious differ from mental states that are not. All higher-order theories rest on the commonsense observation that whenever a mental
Infant Perception
Perception is the set of processes by which organisms interpret and organize sensory information to understand the world and plan appropriate actions across different scenarios. This involves receiving input through the sensory systems (including vision, audition, touch, taste, and smell) and making
Interoception
Interoception refers to how the brain senses, consciously or unconsciously, physiological signals coming from inside the body. It includes a broad range of signals, mechanisms, and functions. It informs the brain of the current physiological state of the body—information that might call for descendi
Scene Perception
As soon as you open your eyes, you perform something that is referred to as scene perception, a cognitive process by which the brain interprets and understands its visual environment. It involves recognizing, organizing, and extracting meaningful information from complex scenes, enabling humans to i
Sensory Substitution
The purpose of sensory substitution devices is to restore functionality of a deficient sensory modality, such as vision for the blind, by using another sensory modality, such as touch or audition. These devices target a broad variety of deficits, such as loss of vision, proprioception, balance, or a
Signal Detection Theory
Signal detection theory is a theoretical framework for understanding how decisions are made under uncertainty. It applies whenever judgments must be based on noisy, imperfect evidence—such as deciding whether a faint stimulus was present, whether a face was seen before, whether a medical test result
Smell
The sense of smell responds to airborne chemicals and alerts us to environmental hazards, it provides information about other people’s emotions and health, and is responsible in a large part for our enjoyment of food and drink. More specifically, olfaction is the chemosensory modality that allows hu
Synesthesia
Synesthesia is a trait in which one sensory input elicits an unusual secondary experience that is not typically associated with that input. For instance, the letter A printed in black may trigger a red color experience. Synesthetic experiences are automatically triggered, idiosyncratic, and unidirec
Taste
According to the narrow scientific definition, taste, or gustation, is defined as the act, or faculty, of tasting. However, in everyday language, the term is used in several different ways. For example, when people say that they like the taste of something, what they really mean is that they like it
Time Perception
Time perception is the name of the topic of research that deals with the perception of temporal properties. Listening to a piece of music, for instance, the experience one has turns centrally on whether two notes sound at the same time or in succession, the order in which different notes are played,
Touch
The sense of touch is intimately familiar to everyone. Touch refers to our sensitivity to the pressure and movement of objects in physical contact with the body. Touch is one aspect of a wider class of sensory abilities known collectively as somatosensation or the bodily senses. Indeed, despite the
Vestibular System
The vestibular system is a key sensory system responsible for self-motion perception and spatial orientation, working in concert with visual, muscular, joint, and tactile receptors to maintain balance. It originates in the inner ear and comprises mechanoreceptors that transduce inertial forces relat
Visual Cognitive Neuroscience
Many of our daily activities are informed by vision, from reading and watching television to driving and sports. At the same time, visual perception during these activities is influenced by our knowledge, expectations, and goals. Visual cognitive neuroscience is the field of research that investigat
Visual Memory
Visual memory encompasses the set of processes we use to retain and access visual information across time, from fleeting glimpses that last milliseconds to detailed memories that persist for years. Cognitive scientists generally consider visual memory to have three interconnected but distinct stages
Visual Search
Visual search refers to the act of looking for targets in a visual world containing distractors. This could be a search for the cat in the living room, a typo in this paragraph, or a tumor in a chest x-ray. In all these cases and others, fundamental capacity limitations assure that we cannot fully p