Synergetics of Cognition

This book presents the invited lectures given at the International Symposium on Synergetics of Cognition held at SchloB Elmau, Bavaria (Fed. Rep. of Germany), June 4-8, 1989. The understanding of the processes underlying cognition is certainly one of the most challenging and difficult problems confronting the human mind. It is an enterprise that requires the cooperation of scientists from fields ranging from the neurosciences and psychology through biology to the computer sciences, physics and mathematics. The papers included in this volume reflect this joint effort. As will be evident, there is a remarkable convergence of ideas stemming from various fields, for instance, the earlier ideas on Gestalt theory celebrate a come­ back and remarkable analogies are being established with modem concepts of self-organization as dealt with in the interdisciplinary field of synergetics. The individual topics range from the microscopic level, where new exciting results on specific oscillations of neural activity are reported, to computer simulations of perception, and finally psychological experiments at the macroscopic level. We hope that this book will convey to its readers the same enthusiasm that was felt by the participants of the symposium. We wish to thank Mrs. U. Funke for the excellent organisation of the sym­ posium, and the Volkswagen-Stiftung, Hannover, for its financial support. We are furthermore grateful to Christoph Stadler and Zora Franko for their help in com­ piling the name and subject indexes. Finally we wish to thank Springer-Verlag, in particular Dr. Angela Lahee, for the excellent cooperation.