How Animals See the World Comparative Behavior, Biology, and Evolution of Vision

About this book

The visual world of animals is highly diverse and often very different from the world that we humans take for granted. How Animals See the World provides an extensive review of the latest behavioral and neurobiological research on animal vision, highlighting fascinating species similarities and differences in visual processing. It contains 26 chapters written by world-leading experts about a variety of species including: honeybees, spiders, fish, birds, and primates. The chapters are divided into six sections: Perceptual grouping and segmentation, Object perception and object recognition, Motion perception, Visual attention, Different dimensions of visual perception, and Evolution of the visual system.

An exhaustive work in range and depth, How Animals See the World will be a valuable resource for advanced students and researchers in areas of cognitive psychology, perception and cognitive neuroscience, as well as researchers in the visual sciences.

Contents

Introduction
Part I. Perceptual grouping and segmentation
Chapter 1: What birds see and what they don't

Part II. Luminance, contrast, and spatial and temporal resolution
Chapter 2: Color vision in fish and other vertebrates
Chapter 3: Grouping and early visual processing in avian vision
Chapter 4: Figure-ground segregation and object-based attention in birds
Chapter 5: Neurobiological foundations of figure-ground segregation in primates
Chapter 6: Illusory perception in animals: Observations and interpretations
Chapter 7: Amodal completion and illusory perception in birds and primates
Chapter 8: Neurobiology of perception of illusory contours in animals

Part III. Object perception and object recognition
Chapter 9: How jumping spiders see the world
Chapter 10: Visual discrimination by the honeybee (Apis mellifera)
Chapter 11: Recognition by components: A birds' eye view
Chapter 12: Birds' perception of depth and objects in pictures
Chapter 13: The recognition of rotated objects in animals
Chapter 14: Neural mechanisms of object recognition in non-human primates

Part IV. Motion perception
Chapter 15: Avian visual processing of motion and objects
Chapter 16: Neural mechanisms underlying visual motion detection in birds
Chapter 17: Primate motion perception

Part V. Visual attention
Chapter 18: Primate visual attention: How studies of monkeys have shaped theories of selective visual processing
Chapter 19: Selective and divided attention in pigeons
Chapter 20: Visual cognition in baboons: Attention to the global and local stimulus properties

Part VI. Different dimensions of visual perception
Chapter 21: Circadian visual system of mammals

Part VII. Evolution of visual system
Chapter 22: Evolution of the brain in vertebrates: Overview
Chapter 23: Evolution of the vertebrate eye
Chapter 24: The avian visual system: Overview
Chapter 25: Development of the visual system in birds and mammals
Chapter 26: Brain asymmetry in vertebrates

Postscript
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Olga F. Lazareva is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Drake University. Her research concentrates on behavioral and neurobiological aspects of visual perception and relational learning in humans and nonhuman animals.

Toru Shimizu is Professor of Psychology at the University of South Florida. His areas of research include the neural basis of vision and cognition in animals.

Edward A. Wasserman is Dewey B. and Velma P. Stuit Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Iowa and coeditor with Thomas Zentall of Comparative Cognition: Experimental Explorations of Animal Intelligence (2006). He is a member of the Delta Center at the University of Iowa, dedicated to the investigation of learning, development, and change. Wasserman's research has centered on learning, memory, cognition, and perception in humans and nonhuman animals.