Emiliano Bruner – författare

Cognitive Archaeology, Body Cognition, and the Evolution of Visuospatial Perception offers a multidisciplinary and comprehensive perspective on the evolution of the visuospatial ability in the human genus. It presents current topics in cognitive sciences and prehistoric archaeology, to provide a bridge between evolutionary anthropology and neurobiology.

This book explores how body perception and spatial sensing may have evolved in humans, as to enhance a "prosthetic capacity� able to integrate the brain, body, and technological elements into a single functional system. It includes chapters on touch and haptics, peripersonal space, parietal lobe evolution, somatosensory integration, neuroarchaeology, visual behavior, attention, and psychometrics.

Cognitive Archaeology, Body Cognition, and the Evolution of Visuospatial Perception represents an essential resource for evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and neuroscientists who are interested in the role of body perception and spatial ability in human cognition.

The book presents an integrative review of paleoneurology, the study of endocranial morphology in fossil species. The main focus is on showing how computed methods can be used to support advances in evolutionary neuroanatomy, paleoanthropology and archaeology and how they have contributed to creating a completely new perspective in cognitive neuroscience. Moreover, thanks to its multidisciplinary approach, the book addresses students and researchers approaching human paleoneurology from different angles and for different purposes, such as biologists, physicians, anthropologists, archaeologists and computer scientists. The individual chapters, written by international experts, represent authoritative reviews of the most important topics in the field. All the concepts are presented in an easy-to-understand style, making them accessible to university students, newcomers and also to anyone interested in understanding how methods like biomedical imaging, digital anatomy and computed and multivariate morphometrics can be used for analyzing ontogenetic and phylogenetic changes according to the principles of functional morphology, morphological integration and modularity.

This book is dedicated to a specific component of paleoneurology, probably the most essential one: endocasts. A series of original papers collected here focuses on describing methods and techniques that are dedicated to reconstruct and study fossil endocasts through computed tools. The book is particularly oriented toward hominid paleoneurology, although it also includes chapters on different taxa to provide a more general view of current perspectives and problems in evolutionary neuroanatomy. The first part of the book concerns techniques and tools to cast endocranial anatomy. The second part deals with computed morphometrics, and the third part is devoted to comparative neurobiology. Those who want to approach the field in general terms will find this book especially helpful, as will those researchers working with endocranial anatomy and brain evolution. The book will also be useful for researchers and graduate students in anthropology, bioarchaeology, medicine, and related fields.