I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

Recent studies of eye movements in reading and other information processing tasks, such as music reading, typing, visual search, and scene perception, are reviewed. The major emphasis of the review is on reading as a specific example of cognitive processing. Basic topics discussed with respect to reading are (a) the characteristics of eye movements, (b) the perceptual span, (c) integration of information across saccades, (d) eye movement control, and (e) individual differences (including dyslexia). Similar topics are discussed with respect to the other tasks examined. The basic theme of the review is that eye movement data reflect moment-to-moment cognitive processes in the various tasks examined. Theoretical and practical considerations concerning the use of eye movement data are also discussed.

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Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

PsyScope is an integrated environment for designing and running psychology experiments on Macintosh computers. The primary goal of PsyScope is to give both psychology students and trained researchers a tool that allows them to design experiments without the need for programming. PsyScope relies on the interactive graphic environment provided by Macintosh computers to accomplish this goal. The standard components of a psychology experiment—groups, blocks, trials, and factors—are all represented graphically, and experiments are constructed by working with these elements in interactive windows and dialogs. In this article, we describe the overall organization of the program, provide an example of how a simple experiment can be constructed within its graphic environment, and discuss some of its technical features (such as its underlying scripting language, timing characteristics, etc.). PsyScope is available for noncommercial purposes free of charge and unsupported to the general research community. Information about how to obtain the program and its documentation is provided.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03204507.pdf

PsyScope: An interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computers

Traditional approaches to human information processing tend to deal with perception and action planning in isolation, so that an adequate account of the perception-action interface is still missing On the perceptual side, the dominant cognitive view largely underestimates, and thus fails to account for, the impact of action-related processes on both the processing of perceptual information and on perceptual learning On the action side, most approaches conceive of action planning as a mere continuation of stimulus processing, thus failing to account for the goal-directedness of even the simplest reaction in an experimental task We propose a new framework for a more adequate theoretical treatment of perception and action planning, in which perceptual contents and action plans are coded in a common representational medium by feature codes with distal reference Perceived events (perceptions) and to-be-produced events (actions) are equally represented by integrated, task-tuned networks of feature codes – cognitive structures we call event codes We give an overview of evidence from a wide variety of empirical domains, such as spatial stimulus-response compatibility, sensorimotor synchronization, and ideomotor action, showing that our main assumptions are well supported by the data

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0140525X01000103

The Theory of Event Coding (TEC): a framework for perception and action planning.

Handwriting has continued to persist as a means of communication and recording information in day-to-day life even with the introduction of new technologies. Given its ubiquity in human transactions, machine recognition of handwriting has practical significance, as in reading handwritten notes in a PDA, in postal addresses on envelopes, in amounts in bank checks, in handwritten fields in forms, etc. This overview describes the nature of handwritten language, how it is transduced into electronic data, and the basic concepts behind written language recognition algorithms. Both the online case (which pertains to the availability of trajectory data during writing) and the off-line case (which pertains to scanned images) are considered. Algorithms for preprocessing, character and word recognition, and performance with practical systems are indicated. Other fields of application, like signature verification, writer authentification, handwriting learning tools are also considered.

/pdf/online-and-off-line-handwriting-recognition-a-comprehensive-4qmt9ty596.pdf

Online and off-line handwriting recognition: a comprehensive survey

A goal of neuropsychology is to connect cognitive functions with underlying neural systems. Posner (1984; in press) has proposed a framework for doing so in which elementary mental operations in cognitive models are expressed in terms of component facilitations and inhibitions in the performance of normal persons. Studies of brain-injured patients are used to link these components to underlying neural systems. In the area of spatial attention one such component is the tendency to inhibit orienting towards visual locations which have been previously attended (inhibition of return). Here we report studies in patients and normals which demonstrate the relationship of this component to neural systems which generate saccades. The first experiment showed that midbrain lesions impairing saccade generation produced a concurrent loss of the inhibition of return, whereas cortical components shown to impair facilitatory components did not. The second and third experiments show that the inhibition of return ...

Inhibition of return : Neural basis and function

This article describes a model of motion planning instantiated for grasping. According to the model, one of the most important aspects of motion planning is establishing a constraint hierarchy - a set of prioritized requirements defining the task to be performed. For grasping, constraints include avoiding collisions with the to-be-grasped objects and minimizing movement-related effort. These and other constraints are combined with instant retrieval (recall of stored postures) and instance generation (generation of new postures and movements to them) to simulate flexible prehension. Dynamic deadline setting is used to regulate termination of instance generation, and performance of more than one movement at a time with a single effector is used to permit obstacle avoidance. Old and new data are accounted for with the model.

Posture-based motion planning: applications to grasping.

Constraints for Action Selection: Overhand Versus Underhand Grips

This article describes a theory of the computations underlying the selection of coordinated motion patterns, especially in reaching tasks. The central idea is that when a spatial target is selected as an object to be reached, stored postures are evaluated for the contributions they can make to the task. Weights are assigned to the stored postures, and a single target posture is found by taking a weighted sum of the stored postures. Movement is achieved by reducing the distance between the starting angle and target angle of each joint. The model explains compensation for reduced joint mobility, tool use, practice effects, performance errors, and aspects of movement kinematics. Extensions of the model can account for anticipation and coarticulation effects, movement through via points, and hierarchical control of series of movements.

Planning reaches by evaluating stored postures.

A goal of research on the cognitive control of movement is to determine how movements are chosen when many movements are possible We addressed this issue by studying how subjects reached for a bar to be moved as quickly as possible from a home location to a target location Ss generally grabbed the bar in a way that afforded a comfortable posture at the target location (the end-state comfort effect) and with the thumb toward the end of the bar that would be aligned with the target (the thumb-toward bias) The data suggested that subjects chose handgrips by retrieving instances of previous reaches, not by carrying out computations that treated candidate reaches as new behavioral events

Jonathan Vaughan

Papers

Inhibition of return : Neural basis and function

Posture-based motion planning: applications to grasping.

Constraints for Action Selection: Overhand Versus Underhand Grips

Planning reaches by evaluating stored postures.

Time course of movement planning: selection of handgrips for object manipulation.