Sensation & Perception (Wolfe, Kluender, Levi, 2006)

Sensation & Perception (Wolfe, Kluender, Levi, 2006)

Second Edition

Why does the sky look blue? Why does sugar taste sweet? Can my dog hear the same things I hear? We all start out as natural enthusiasts for the subject material of a Sensation and Perception class. Sinauer Associates new Sensation and Perception text is written by experts in each of the five senses who never lost that enthusiasm and who have a passion for conveying the excitement of this field of study to students. Sensation and Perception provides up-to-date and accurate descriptions of vision, audition, touch, taste, and olfaction in a lively and engaging manner. The book reflects the recent explosion of knowledge in higher-level perception with extensive coverage of topics such as attention, haptic perception, and speech and music. At the same time, the text provides a solid grounding in the basics of sensory physiology and psychophysics.
For students for whom this is the beginning and end of their study of sensation and perception, this text is intended to give an accessible, engaging and intellectually satisfying survey of the major topics in the field. For those who are continuing, the text will be a stimulating invitation to more extensive study in this rich field.

This is the first introductory sensation and perception textbook to take advantage of full-color printing through out. A robust website includes activities and demonstrations as well as additional written material for added depth.

p.3 Perception and your sense of reality are the products of evolution. Human senses have evolved to help us act in ways that encourage our survival... In general, our senses have evolved to match just the sorts of energy in the environment that are most important for our survival. However, the energy that humans can sense is a small subset of the energy that surrounds us.

p.5 Perceptual systems are acutely sensitive to change... In fact, we tend to be quite unaware of things in our environment that do not change. Things that move draw our attention. [JLJ - things that might move or that might cause us stress by moving also draw our attention, via our imagination.]

p.6 A transducer is any substance or structure that changes energy from one form to another form. For every sense, first there are transducers that transform information about the world - whether light, sound, pressure, or chemical composition - into neural signals that can be interpreted by the brain. Higher-level aspects of perception are more likely to involve higher brain structures, and they are generally are more dependent on experience.

p.188 William James declared, "Everyone knows what attention is." This great nineteenth-century psychologist went on to say, "It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought"