Percept, Decision, Action

Beschreibung

Seemingly simple behaviours turn out, on reflection, to bediscouragingly complex. For many years, cognitive operations suchas sensation, perception, comparing percepts to stored models(short-term and long-term memory), decision-making and planning ofactions were treated by most neuroscientists as separate areas ofresearch. This was not because the neuroscience community believedthese operations to act independently--it is intuitive thatany common cognitive process seamlessly interweaves theseoperations--but because too little was known about theindividual processes constituting the full behaviour, andexperimental paradigms and data collection methods were notsufficiently well developed to put the processes in sequence in anycontrolled manner. These limitations are now being overcome in theleading cognitive neuroscience laboratories, and this book is atimely summary of the current state of the art. The theme of the book is how the brain uses sensory informationto develop and decide upon the appropriate action, and how thebrain determines the appropriate action to optimize the collectionof new sensory information. It addresses several key questions. Howare percepts built up in the cortex and how are judgments of thepercept made? In what way does information flow within and betweencortical regions, and what is accomplished by successive (andreverberating) stages of processing? How are decisions made aboutthe percept subsequently acted upon, through their conversion to aresponse according to the learned criterion for action? How doesthe predicted or expected sensation interact with the actualincoming flow of sensory signals? The chapters anddiscussions in the book reveal how answering these questionsrequires an understanding of sensory-motor loops: ourperception of the world drives new actions, and the actionsundertaken at any moment lead to a new 'view' of theworld. This book is a fascinating read for all clinical andexperimental psychologists and neuroscientists, as well asanyone interested in how we perceive the world and act withinit.

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Derek J. Chadwick

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