Zoï Kapoula - Böcker

Dyslexia affects about 10% of all children and is a potent cause of loss of self-confidence, personal and family misery, and waste of potential. Although the dominant view is that it is caused by specifically linguistic/phonological weakness, recent research within the field of neuroscience has shown that it is associated wtih visual processing problems as well. These discoveries have led to a resurgence in visual methods of treatment, which have shown promising results. 'Visual aspects of dyslexia' brings together cutting edge research from a range of disciplines - including neurology, neuroscience, and the vision sciences, to present the first comprehensive review of this recent research. It includes chapters from leading specialists which, in addition to reporting on the latest research, show how this knowledge is being successfully applied in the development of effective visual treatments for this common problem. Sections within the book cover the role of eye movements in reading, visual attention and reading, the neural bases of reading, and the relationship between visual stress and dyslexia.Making a valuable contribution in helping us develop a deeper understanding of dyslexia, this is an important book for those in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and education.

This stimulating volume on vision extends well beyond the traditional areas of vision research and places the subject in a much broader philosophical context. The emphasis throughout is to integrate and illuminate the visual process. The first three parts of the volume provide authoritative overviews on computational vision and neural networks, on the neurophysiology of visual cortex processing, and on eye-movement research. Each of these parts illustrates how different research perspectives may jointly solve fundamental problems related to the efficiency of visual perception, to the relationship between vision and eye-movements and to the neurophysiological 'codes' underlying our visual perceptions. In the fourth part, leading vision scientists introduce the reader to some major philosophical problems in vision research such as the nature of 'ultimate' codes for perceptual events, the duality of psycho-physics, the bases of visual recognition and the paradigmatic foundations of computer-vision research.

This stimulating volume on vision extends well beyond the traditional areas of vision research and places the subject in a much broader philosophical context. The emphasis throughout is to integrate and illuminate the visual process. The first three parts of the volume provide authoritative overviews on computational vision and neural networks, on the neurophysiology of visual cortex processing, and on eye-movement research. Each of these parts illustrates how different research perspectives may jointly solve fundamental problems related to the efficiency of visual perception, to the relationship between vision and eye-movements and to the neurophysiological 'codes' underlying our visual perceptions. In the fourth part, leading vision scientists introduce the reader to some major philosophical problems in vision research such as the nature of 'ultimate' codes for perceptual events, the duality of psycho-physics, the bases of visual recognition and the paradigmatic foundations of computer-vision research.

The final section deals with evolutionary aesthetics (responsible editor Julien Renoult). Chapter "Composing Music from Neuronal Activity: The Spikiss Project" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The book presents three studies in which eye tracking data were collected at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen in June and July 2013. Overall, the results of those three studies highlight the knowledge gained from the analysis of the very first saccade in a museum context, when people look at paintings and statues.The first study analyzes how viewers orient their first saccade on paintings. This study shows that, in a museum, the first saccade is attracted toward the center of paintings. This attraction toward the paintings’ center is found in all the subjects’ groups that we have studied. Noteworthily, this effect is significantly less pronounced in individuals who never visit museums. It is among amateurs, who often visit museums, that the center attracts the most the first saccade. Among experts, painters or art history teachers, and to a lesser extent among amateurs, the pictorial composition largely determines the orientation of the first saccade. We indeed found that, as soon as the first saccade, experts orient their gaze toward the main subject. This phenomenon seems to be explained by the fact that experts immediately orient their gaze (here measured as the first saccade) toward the paintings’ location conveying the most meaning. It can either be the center, or a peripheral area, depending on whether the paintings’ most meaningful subject is located centrally or peripherally.The second study shows that the center does not attract the first saccade in 5-year-old children. This behavior appears later, in 8- to 10-year-old children. However, noticeably, the 8–10-year-old children orient significantly less frequently their first saccade toward the paintings’ center as adults do, and this is also true when one considers non-expert adult viewers.The results of the third study focus on statues and reveal a very different oculomotor behavior: Indeed, rather than looking at the center, statues’ viewers exhibit a clear tendency to saccade first at the statues’ contours. This stands in contrast with the behavior that we observe with paintings. Our study concludes that statues trigger a specific oculomotor behavior. The latter appears to be mostly driven by the physical presence that stone bodies incarnate. The movement and the climax of this movement, that sculptors manage to convey, thus turn out to attract the gaze in a unique fashion.The book concludes that the first saccade is a powerful indicator of the oculomotor behavior that greatly improves our comprehension of the unique relationship between a viewer and artworks.

The book presents three studies in which eye tracking data were collected at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen in June and July 2013. Overall, the results of those three studies highlight the knowledge gained from the analysis of the very first saccade in a museum context, when people look at paintings and statues.The first study analyzes how viewers orient their first saccade on paintings. This study shows that, in a museum, the first saccade is attracted toward the center of paintings. This attraction toward the paintings’ center is found in all the subjects’ groups that we have studied. Noteworthily, this effect is significantly less pronounced in individuals who never visit museums. It is among amateurs, who often visit museums, that the center attracts the most the first saccade. Among experts, painters or art history teachers, and to a lesser extent among amateurs, the pictorial composition largely determines the orientation of the first saccade. We indeed found that, as soon as the first saccade, experts orient their gaze toward the main subject. This phenomenon seems to be explained by the fact that experts immediately orient their gaze (here measured as the first saccade) toward the paintings’ location conveying the most meaning. It can either be the center, or a peripheral area, depending on whether the paintings’ most meaningful subject is located centrally or peripherally.The second study shows that the center does not attract the first saccade in 5-year-old children. This behavior appears later, in 8- to 10-year-old children. However, noticeably, the 8–10-year-old children orient significantly less frequently their first saccade toward the paintings’ center as adults do, and this is also true when one considers non-expert adult viewers.The results of the third study focus on statues and reveal a very different oculomotor behavior: Indeed, rather than looking at the center, statues’ viewers exhibit a clear tendency to saccade first at the statues’ contours. This stands in contrast with the behavior that we observe with paintings. Our study concludes that statues trigger a specific oculomotor behavior. The latter appears to be mostly driven by the physical presence that stone bodies incarnate. The movement and the climax of this movement, that sculptors manage to convey, thus turn out to attract the gaze in a unique fashion.The book concludes that the first saccade is a powerful indicator of the oculomotor behavior that greatly improves our comprehension of the unique relationship between a viewer and artworks.

This edited monograph provides a compelling analysis of the interplay between neuroscience and aesthetics. The book broaches a wide spectrum of topics including, but not limited to, mathematics and creator algorithms, neurosciences of artistic creativity, paintings and dynamical systems as well as computational research for architecture. The international authorship is genuinely interdisciplinary and the target audience primarily comprises readers interested in transdisciplinary research between neuroscience and the broad field of aesthetics.

The book is organized around 4 sections. The first deals with the creativity and its neural basis (responsible editor Emmanuelle Volle). The second section concerns the neurophysiology of aesthetics (responsible editor Zoï Kapoula). It covers a large spectrum of different experimental approaches going from architecture, to process of architectural creation and issues of architectural impact on the gesture of the observer. Neurophysiological aspects such as space navigation, gesture, body posture control are involved in the experiments described as well as questions about terminology and valid methodology. The next chapter contains studies on music, mathematics and brain (responsible editor Moreno Andreatta). The final section deals with evolutionary aesthetics (responsible editor Julien Renoult).Chapter "Composing Music from Neuronal Activity: The Spikiss Project" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.