Cognitive Contributions to the Perception of Spatial and Temporal Events

The book is concerned with the cognitive contributions to perception, that is, with the influence of attention, intention, or motor processes on performances in spatial and temporal tasks. The chapters deal with fundamental perceptual processes resulting from the simple localization of an object in space or from the temporal determination of an event within a series of events.Chapters are based on presentations given at the Symposium on the Cognitive Contributions to the Perception of Spatial and Temporal Events (September 7–9, 1998, Ohlstadt, Germany). Following each chapter are commentary pieces from other researchers in the field. At the meeting, contributors were encouraged to discuss their theoretical positions along with presenting empirical results and the book's commentary sections help to preserve the spirit and controversies of the symposium.The general topic of the book is split into three parts. Two sections are devoted to the perception of unimodal spatial and temporal events; and are accompanied by a third part on spatio-temporal processes in the domain of intermodal integration.

The themes of the book are highly topical. There is a growing interest in studies both with healthy persons and with patients that focus on localization errors and dissociations in localizations resulting from different tasks. These errors lead to new concepts of how visual space is represented. Such deviations are not only observed in the spatial domain but in the temporal domain as well. Typical examples are errors in duration judgments or synchronization errors in tapping tasks. In addition, several studies indicate the influence of attention on both the timing and on the localization of dynamic events. Another intriguing question originates from well-known interactions between intermodal events, namely, whether these events are based on a single representation or whether different representations interact.

Glsa Aschersleben worked as research and teaching assistant from 1987 to 1991 at the Psychological Institute of the Technical University in Munich, her main research interests then being man-computer interaction and software ergonomics. Since 1991 she has been a senior researcher at the Department for Cognition and Action at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich. In 1993 she completed her thesis in psychology on Afferent Information Processing and the Synchronization of Events. Her habilitation was on Task Dependent Timing of Perceptual Events (1998). At present her main research interests are: temporal control of actions, cognitive representations of actions, perception-action, coupling, attention, intersensory integration.

Jochen Müsseler worked as research assistant and teaching assistant in Cognitive Psychology and Psycholinguistics at the Universities of Bochum, Bielefeld, and Munich. Since 1996 he has been senior scientist at the Department for Cognition and Action at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich. His current research interests focus on the interface of perception and action, the cognitive representation of actions, the perception of space and time, and the attention mechanisms.