Sensory Individuals: Unimodal and Multimodal Perspectives provides an interdisciplinary, well-balanced, and comprehensive look at different aspects of unisensory and multisensory objects, using both nuanced philosophical analysis and informed empirical work.
The research presented in this book represents the field's progression from treating neural sensory processes as primarily modality-specific towards its current state of the art, according to which perception, and its supporting neural processes, are multi-modal, modality-independent, meta-modal, and task-dependent. Even within such approaches sensory stimuli, properties, brain activations, and corresponding perceptual phenomenology can still be characterized in a modality-specific way. The book examines the basic building blocks of human perception, and whether they are best understood as sensory modality dependent units of different forms or multimodal perceptual objects.
The book combines a variety of innovative and integrative angles to explore the topic and acts as a catalyst for an increasingly diverse field of research, which is in an exciting phase of growth and advancement. New questions are arising as quickly as they are being answered, and the collection Sensory Individuals provides an original and up-to-date addition to the field.
Aleksandra Mroczko-Wrasowicz, Rick Grush: Introduction Sensory individuals: Contemporary perspectives on modality-specific and multimodal objecthood Part 1: Conceptual, developmental, and methodological aspects of studying sensory individuals 1: Scott P. Johnson, J. Gavin Bremner, Alan Slater: Origins of object concepts in infancy: A perceptual account 2: Aleksandra Mroczko-Wrasowicz, Nastazja Stoch, Paulina Zguda: What makes something a perceptual object? 3: Philip J. Kellman, Viyehni Fuchser: Visual completion and intermediate representations in object formation 4: Jake Quilty-Dunn: Sensory binding without sensory individuals 5: Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco, Brian J. Scholl: Figments of imagination: 'Scaffolded attention' creates non-sensory object and event representations 6: Berit Brogaard, Thomas A. Sørensen: Perceptual variation in object perception: a defense of perceptual pluralism Part 2: Sensory individuals in unimodal perception 7: Frédérique de Vignemont: Looming perception: Seeing in a dynamic world 8: Alessandra Buccella, Mazviita Chirimuuta: Shine of bronze and sound of brass: the relational perceptual constructs of timbre and gloss 9: Ronald DiTullio, Yale Cohen: Mechanisms underlying auditory object perception 10: Nick Young, Bence Nanay: Audition and composite sensory individuals 11: William Lycan: What is it we touch? 12: Stephen Pierzchajlo, Jonas Olofsson: Human olfaction: A view from the top 13: Clare Batty, Barry C. Smith: A world of odours 14: Benjamin D. Young: Smelling odours and tasting flavours: distinguishing orthonasal from retronasal olfaction Part 3: Sensory individuals in multimodal perception 15: Mohan Matthen: Material objects as the singular subjects of multimodal perception 16: Charles Spence: Multisensory feature integration 17: Jonathan Cohen: Multimodal binding as mereological co-constituency 18: Simon Lacey, K. Sathian: Visuo-haptic object processing in the multisensory brain 19: Casey O'Callaghan: Crossmodal identification 20: E. J. Green: The multisensory perception of persistence 21: Matthew Fulkerson: Faces as multisensory individuals 22: B/la:zej Skrzypulec: Multimodal structure of painful experiences 23: Fabrizio Calzavarini, Alberto Voltolini: Pictures as supramodal sensory individuals
Aleksandra Mroczko-Wrasowicz is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Warsaw. She earned her PhD in philosophy and neuroscience from the University of Mainz and the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main in 2011. Before coming to Warsaw, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum and the University of Duesseldorf, and Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition at the National Yang-Ming University in Taipei. Her research centres on empirically informed philosophy of perception and philosophy of cognitive neuroscience. Aleksandra Mroczko-Wrasowicz has worked on the phenomenon of synaesthesia, the unity of consciousness, modularity, cognitive enhancement, and interactions between perceptual modalities. Rick Grush is currently Professor of Philosophy at UCSD. He received a joint doctorate in philosophy and cognitive science from UCSD in 1995. From his doctoral dissertation to the early 2000s, Rick Grush developed the emulation theory of perception, imagery, and motor control. He then extended this framework to account for spatial and temporal aspects of perception. His research centres on theories of spatial and temporal representation and theoretical cognitive neuroscience.
