The Editors

Narayanan Srinivasan is currently a professor at the Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences (CBCS), University of Allahabad. Since 2006, Dr Srinivasan is also a visiting scientist at the Riken Brain Science Institute, Japan. He has a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Science and subsequently earned his PhD in Psychology from the University of Georgia, USA in 1996. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Louisville in areas including visual perception and ophthalmology for two years (1996–98). Prior to joining the Centre for Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences in 2003, he worked at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He employs different methodologies to study cognitive processes and is interested in the study of perception, attention, actions, emotions, and language processing. Dr Srinivasan has numerous publications in international journals and has edited books. He has made many presentations at national and international conferences. Dr Srinivasan is the Convenor of the Cognitive Division of the National Academy of Psychology (India). His hobby is reading books.

Bhoomika R. Kar is a faculty member at the Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Allahabad since December 2002. After completing her post graduation in Psychology from University of Lucknow, she completed MPhil in Medical and Social Psychology from the Central Institute of Psychiatry, Ranchi. She did her PhD at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore. She specializes in neuropsychology, particularly developmental neuropsychology. Her areas of research interest include cognitive development, dyslexia and bilingualism (cross linguistic transfer). Dr Kar has developed and standardized the NIMHANS neuropsychological battery for children (five to 15 years of age). This battery is being employed for child neuropsychological assessment and for research on cognitive disorders in children at various academic institutions and clinical settings in India. She has studied the pattern of growth trends of different cognitive processes. She has published her work in international and national journals and has made numerous presentations at international and national conferences.

Janak Pandey has served as Professor of Psychology, University of Allahabad since 1978. He is at present the Head of the Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences.

Earlier, after his return from Kansas State University, where he earned his PhD degree as a Fulbright Scholar, he served as Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He has also been a scholar-in-residence and Visiting Professor at the Wake Forest University, Professional Associate at the East-West Centre, Hawaii, Visiting Senior Commonwealth Fellow at the University of Manitoba and Visiting Professor, University of Leiden. Prof. Pandey has wide experience of academic- administrative positions (as HOD, Psychology; Dean, Faculty of Arts; Pro-Vice Chancellor; Vice-Chancellor for interim period at Allahabad University, and Director, G. B. Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad), membership of academic committees (UGC, ICSSR, NCERT, and Universities), and international experience (leader/member of delegation, invited addresses in conferences). Prof. Pandey's contributions to the discipline have received recognition in the form of several awards, including the ICSSR Professor V. K. R. V. Rao Award in Psychology in 1989, National Fellowship in 1998, and Honorary Fellow of International Association of Cross Cultural Psychology in 2006. He is associated with a number of professional organizations and has held significant positions, such as President of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, and Associate Editor of The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. His tireless efforts as the editor of the Third and Fourth Surveys of Psychology in India, over two decades have resulted in publication of six volumes known as “Psychology in India: State of the Art,” providing international recognition to psychology research and profession. Prof. Pandey's work on social influence processes is well known and widely cited. His recent work demonstrates how the subjective construction of economic hardship and environmental degradation is related to coping and health. His emphasis on social-cultural context variables in the study of human nature makes his contributions highly meaningful and relevant.

The Contributors

Ahmed is a PhD student at University of Hyderabad. His interests include sequence learning and brain imaging.

Raju S. Bapi holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Arlington. He obtained his post-doctoral training at the University of Plymouth. Later he was Research Scientist at ATR labs, Kyoto. Currently he is Reader in Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Hyderabad. His interests include cognitive and computational modelling of sequence and skill learning.

Shruti Baijal graduated with Honours in Zoology and obtained MSc in Cognitive Science. She is currently doing PhD in Cognitive Science and uses an integrative approach involving psychophysics and electrophysiology to study attention and awareness. She has been awarded the Studentship by the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO). She has also worked on neural and cognitive changes due to meditation.

V. S. Chandrasekhar Pammi holds a PhD from the University of Hyderabad. He obtained his Postdoctoral training at Gregory Bern's lab, Emory University, Atlanta, USA. Currently he is a Research Scientist at Cognitive Neuroimaging Group, Max Plank Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany. His interests include modelling complexity in learning.

Gustavo Deco is Research Professor and leader of the Computational Neuroscience group at the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats at the Pompeu Fabra University, Spain. He received his PhD in Physics in 1987 from National University of Rosario, Argentina. From 1990 to 2003, he led the Computational Neuroscience Group at the Siemens Corporate Research Center in Munich. In 1997, he obtained his habilitation in Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich. In 2001, he received his PhD in Psychology for his thesis on Visual Attention at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich.

Arnaud Destrebecqz is Assistant Professor at the Psychology Department of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). In collaboration with Axel Cleeremans and Pierre Perruchet, he is working on the role of elementary associative mechanisms in learning and social cognition. Much of his work makes use of connectionist networks as theoretical models of human cognition.

Kenji Doya holds a PhD from University of Tokyo, Japan. He obtained his postdoctoral training at A. Selverston lab, UCSD, LA, USA and later at T. Sejnowski lab, The Salk Institute, USA. Currently he heads the Neural Computation Unit in the Initial Research Project at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), Okinawa, Japan. His interests include sequence learning, neuro-modulators and meta-learning.

David M. Eagleman, PhD, holds joint appointments in Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. He directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action as well as the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. His laboratory researches time perception, synesthesia, visual illusions, and how neuroscience will affect the legal system.

Garipelli Gangadhar is a research assistant at Idiap Research Institute where he explores the use of electroencephalogram correlates of cognitive-states such as alarms and anticipation for brain-computer interaction. He is currently pursuing doctoral degree at EPFL in Switzerland. He received masters degree in computational neuroscience in IIT Madras.

Dietmar Heinke is a senior lecturer at the School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. Before joining the School of Psychology he completed an MSc in electrical [Page 273]engineering (Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany) and a PhD in Neuroinformatics (Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany). His research interests include developing computational models for a broad range of psychological phenomena. His recent models cover empirical findings on visual attention, action selection and affordances. Especially, his Selective Attention for Identification model (SAIM) explains a large set of experimental evidence on attention and its disorders.

John M. Holden is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Winona State University in the USA. His research interests include reward-specific expectancies, psychoneuroimmunology as it relates to Alzheimer's and related disorders, addictive drugs and their effects on learning, and animal learning, psychopharmacology, and ethology in general.

Glyn W. Humphreys is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Birmingham. He has research interests in the cognitive neuroscience of vision, attention, and action. He has received the British Psychological Society's President's Award and its Cognitive Psychology Prize, and he is a former President of the Experimental Psychology Society. He was the founding editor of Visual Cognition and is currently editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

Bipin Indurkhya did his ME (Electronics) from Philips International Institute of Technological Studies, Eindhoven and PhD (Computer Science) from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He spent 20 years teaching at various universities including Boston University and Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan. Since 2004, he has been with IIT-Hyderabad. His current research includes studying and modelling creativity, usability studies, and developing tools for assisting cognition and communication for autistic and dyslexic children.

Denny Joseph was awarded a degree in Electrical Engineering in 2005. At the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, he pursued his research interests in computational neuroscience and reinforcement learning, and was awarded an MS degree. He recently filed a patent application at the European Patent Office. He is currently employed with the Emirates Airline and Group in Dubai, as a Strategic Research and Innovation Officer.

Neha Khetrapal has completed her masters in Cognitive Science from the Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Allahabad, India and BA in Psychology (Honours) from Delhi University. The author is a holder of German Research Foundation award at the newly established Excellence Cluster “Cognitive Interaction Technology” at the Bielefeld University, Germany. She is interested in spatial cognition as well as emotions.

Elisabetta Làdavas is a Professor of Physiological Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Bologna, Italy. She is the director of the International PhD programme in Cognitive Neuroscience, president of Italian Neuropsychological Society and the scientific director of Cognitive Neuroscience Centre, University of Bologna. She is interested in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neuropsychology of human selective attention in vision, hearing and touch, representation of space and crossmodal integration.

Sidney R. Lehky has a PhD in Biophysics and Theoretical Biology from the University of Chicago. He did his thesis work on human visual psychophysics and did postdoctoral studies on neural network modelling at Johns Hopkins University and monkey neurophysiology at NIH. Since then he has worked at a variety of research facilities on issues related to visual perception.

Eirini Mavritsaki is a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Birmingham, Department of Psychology, investigating the cognitive functions using models of spiking neurons. She studied Mathematics in University of Crete, where she received her diploma in Applied Mathematics. She then continued as a research associate in the FORTH, IACM in Crete where she worked in mathematical modelling in underwater acoustics. She obtained her PhD degree in Computational Neuroscience from the University of Sheffield, studying the underlying mechanism in nictitating membrane response during classical conditioning.

K. P. Miyapuram holds a PhD from University of Cambridge, UK. Currently he is a Research Scientist at Unilever, Netherlands. His interests include sequence learning and reward based learning.

J. Bruce Overmier is Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, USA (Graduate Faculties of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science). Overmier has been president of a number of psychological organizations as well as of the International Union of Psychological Science (2004–08). Overmier's research spans specialties of learning, memory, stress, psychosomatic disorders, and their biological substrates.

Vani Pariyadath is a graduate student in Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. She obtained her master degree in Cognitive Science from the Centre for Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences. Her research interests include time perception and vision.

Saumil Patel received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Houston and is a Senior Research Scientist in the Sereno laboratory. His research is directed towards understanding fundamental mechanisms of vision and visual perception. It includes [Page 275]empirical and theoretical studies of stereoscopic depth perception, eye movements, position and motion perception, and visual attention. He is also involved in the development of instrumentation for optical recording of neural activity.

Xinmiao Peng received her PhD in Neuroscience from Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis in 2004. She then joined Dr John Maunsell's lab as a research associate at Baylor College of Medicine. In 2006 Xinmiao became a postdoctoral fellow in Dr Anne Sereno's lab at the School of Medicine, University of Texas, Houston.

Trevor B. Penney received his PhD in psychology from Columbia University, New York, in 1997. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig, Germany from 1997 to 2000. Subsequently, he was a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Since July 2006, he has been an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include the cognitive and neural substrates underlying interval timing and memory.

Michael I. Posner is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon and Adjunct Prof. of Psychology in Psychiatry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where he served as founding director of the Sackler Institute. Posner is best known for his work with Marcus Raichle on imaging the human brain during cognitive tasks. He has worked on the anatomy, circuitry, development and genetics of three attentional networks underlying alertness, orienting and voluntary control of thoughts and ideas. His methods for measuring these networks have been applied to neurological, psychiatric, and developmental disorders. His current research involves training of attention in young children to understand the interaction of specific experience and genes in shaping attention.

Viviane Pouthas obtained her PhD in Psychology from University of Paris in 1979. She is currently the Director of Research at the CNRS, France and heads the team on “Perception of time and of rhythms: mechanisms and dysfunction”. She is a member of specialists committee at the universities of TOURS and LILLE. She teaches for masters degree at University of Paris. She is interested in cognitive neuroscience of time perception.

Anne B. Sereno is an American neuroscientist whose discovery of object and spatial information in unexpected areas of the brain challenges our current understanding of visual processing. In other research, she advanced methods to measure treatment efficacy on cognitive function and define subtypes in human clinical disorders. She received her PhD from Harvard University and is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.

Andrea Serino is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and is also associated with the Centre for Studies and Researches in Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Bologna. His main research interests focus on integration of information from different sensory modalities in order to represent the body and peripersonal space. He also works with brain damaged patients with the aim of developing and evaluating rehabilitative programmes for neuropsychological deficits following stroke and traumatic brain injuries.

Kazuko Shinohara is Associate Professor at Institution of Symbiotic Science and Technology, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan. Major fields of interest are cognitive linguistic study of spatial and temporal concepts, emotion metaphors in language and their multimodal representation, and embodied nature of sound symbolism.

Malini Shukla was a graduate student at the Centre for Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences. She is interested in learning disabilities.

V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy received the BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1989, and MS and PhD degrees from the University of Texas at Austin in 1991 and 1996, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India.

Siwei Liu received a BSc in Applied Psychology from Sun Yat-Sen University, China in 2005, and an MSc degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of York, UK in 2006. She is now a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore. Her research interest lies in the cognitive and brain basis of categorization and expectation.

Kazuhiro Tamura received BE and ME degrees in computer science at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan. He was technical staff of the Laboratory for Perceptual Dynamics at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute. His research interests are in cognitive processes and spatial navigation.

Barbara Tversky is Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College and Professor Emerita of Psychology at Stanford University. Her research interests have included memory, categorization, spatial language and thinking, event perception and cognition, diagrammatic reasoning, gesture, and visual communication, including applications to design, human-computer interaction, and education.

Latha Vaitilingam received a BSoc Sci (Hons) degree in Psychology from the National University of Singapore in 2007. Since February 2008, she has been pursuing an MSc degree in Neuropsychology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

Cees van Leeuwen did his PhD in experimental psychology at the University of Nijmegen on the processing of visual object structure. Currently he is head of the Laboratory for Perceptual Dynamics at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute. His research interests are in mid-level vision, brain dynamics, and creative processes

Kielan Yarrow currently works as a lecturer at the Department of Psychology, City University, London. He began his research career at the MRC Human Movement and Balance Unit in Queen Square, London, and subsequently completed his PhD and post- doc at the Institute of Neurology, UCL, and the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL, respectively. Kielan's research interests include multisensory perception (particularly temporal perception), attention, and action. His preferred research methods include psychophysics and transcranial magnetic stimulation.