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.

Chair's introduction (Ranulfo Romo).Active construction of percepts about object location (DoriDerdikman, Marcin Szwed, Knarik Bagdasarian, Per Magne Knutsen,Maciej Pietr, Chunxiu Yu, Amos Arieli and Ehud Ahissar).DiscussionNeuronal encoding of natural stimuli: the rat tactile systemMathew E. Diamond, Erik Zorzin and Ehsan Arabzadeh).Discussion.Cortical commands in active touch (Michael Brecht).Discussion.General discussion I.Switching of sensorimotor transformations: antisaccades andparietal cortex (Shabtai Barash and Mingsha Zhang).Discussion.Saccade initiation and the reliability of motor signals involvedin the generation of saccadic eye movements (David L. Sparks andXintian Hu).Discussion.Multiple roles of experience in decoding the neuralrepresentation of sensory stimuli (Joshua I. Gold).Discussion.General discussion II.Computational approaches to visual decision making (JochenDitterich).Discussion.The inferior parietal lobule: where action becomes perception(Giacomo Rizzolatti, Pier Francesco Ferrari, Stefano Rozzi andLeonardo Fogassi).Discussion.The evolution of the neocortex in mammals: intrinsic andextrinsic contributions to the cortical phenotype (Sarah J. Karlenand Leah Krubitzer).Discussion.General discussion III.Decoding the temporal evolution of a simple perceptual act(Ranulfo Romo, Adrián Hernández, Antonio Zainos, LuisLemus, Victor de Lafuente, Rogelio Luna and VerónicaNacher).Discussion.Probabilistic mechanisms in sensorimotor control (Konrad P.Körding and Daniel M. Wolpert).Discussion.Human brain activation during viewing of dynamic natural scenes(Uri Hasson and Rafael Malach).Discussion.Representation of object images by combinations of visualfeatures in the macaque inferior temporal cortex (Manabu Tanifuji,Kazushige Tsunoda and Yukako Yamane).Discussion.General discussion IV.Psychophysical investigations into cortical encoding ofvibrotactile stimuli (Justin A. Harris).Discussion.Why is language unique to humans (Jacques Mehler, MarinaNespor, Mohinish Shukla and Marcela Peña)?Discussion.Final general discussion.Index of Contributors.Subject Index.