Percept, Decision, Action (PDF)

Seemingly simple behaviours turn out, on reflection, to be
discouragingly complex. For many years, cognitive operations such
as sensation, perception, comparing percepts to stored models
(short-term and long-term memory), decision-making and planning of
actions were treated by most neuroscientists as separate areas of
research. This was not because the neuroscience community believed
these operations to act independently--it is intuitive that
any common cognitive process seamlessly interweaves these
operations--but because too little was known about the
individual processes constituting the full behaviour, and
experimental paradigms and data collection methods were not
sufficiently well developed to put the processes in sequence in any
controlled manner. These limitations are now being overcome in the
leading cognitive neuroscience laboratories, and this book is a
timely summary of the current state of the art.

The theme of the book is how the brain uses sensory information
to develop and decide upon the appropriate action, and how the
brain determines the appropriate action to optimize the collection
of new sensory information. It addresses several key questions. How
are percepts built up in the cortex and how are judgments of the
percept made? In what way does information flow within and between
cortical regions, and what is accomplished by successive (and
reverberating) stages of processing? How are decisions made about
the percept subsequently acted upon, through their conversion to a
response according to the learned criterion for action? How does
the predicted or expected sensation interact with the actual
incoming flow of sensory signals? The chapters and
discussions in the book reveal how answering these questions
requires an understanding of sensory-motor loops: our
perception of the world drives new actions, and the actions
undertaken at any moment lead to a new 'view' of the
world.

This book is a fascinating read for all clinical and
experimental psychologists and neuroscientists, as well as
anyone interested in how we perceive the world and act within
it.