How Animals See the World: Comparative Behavior, Biology, and Evolution of Vision

The visual world of animals is highly diverse and often very different from the world that we humans take for granted. This book provides an extensive review of the latest behavioral and neurobiological research on animal vision, highlighting fascinating species similarities and differences in visual processing. It contains 26 chapters written by world-leading experts about a variety of species including: honeybees, spiders, fish, birds, and primates. The chapters are divided into six sections: Perceptual grouping and segmentation, Object perception and object recognition, Motion perception, Visual attention, Different dimensions of visual perception, and Evolution of the visual system. An exhaustive work in range and depth, How Animals See the World will be a valuable resource for advanced students and researchers in areas of cognitive psychology, perception and cognitive neuroscience, as well as researchers in the visual sciences.

Olga F. Lazareva is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Drake University. Her research concentrates on behavioral and neurobiological aspects of visual perception and relational learning in humans and nonhuman animals.

Toru Shimizu is Professor of Psychology at the University of South Florida. His areas of research include the neural basis of vision and cognition in animals.

Edward A. Wasserman is Dewey B. and Velma P. Stuit Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Iowa and coeditor with Thomas Zentall of Comparative Cognition: Experimental Explorations of Animal Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2006). He is a member of the Delta Center at the University of Iowa, dedicated to the investigation of learning, development, and change. Wasserman’s research has centered on learning, memory, cognition, and perception in humans and nonhuman animals.