Sensation & Perception, Second Edition

Jeremy M. Wolfe, Keith R. Kluender, Dennis M. Levi, Linda M. Bartoshuk, Rachel S. Herz, Roberta L. Klatzky, Susan J. Lederman, and Daniel M. Merfeld

Oct. 17, 2008
415 pages, 421 illustrations
casebound

About This Title

Sensation and Perception, written by experts on each of the senses, provides a comprehensive yet accessible survey of the major topics in the field. This new Second Edition has been revised throughout to include the most recent work. More connections have been made so that student can see how facts about one sense inform our understanding of the others. The popular companion website is being updated with more demonstrations and exercises.

An entirely new chapter on the vestibular system has been added. Additionally, there is new coverage of visual development, the neural basis of object recognition, body image and out-of-body experiences, brain plasticity, pheromones and chemicals that may influence human sexual attraction, and much more.

About the Authors

Jeremy M. Wolfe is Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. His early work includes papers on binocular vision, adaptation, and accommodation. Dr. Wolfe was trained as a vision researcher/experimental psychologist and remains one today. The bulk of his recent work has dealt with visual search and visual attention. He has taught Introductory Psychology for over twenty-five years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he won the Baker Memorial Prize for undergraduate teaching in 1989. He teaches Perception at Harvard.

Keith R. Kluender is Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research encompasses: how people hear complex sounds such as speech; how experience shapes the way we hear; how what we hear guides our actions and communication; clinical problems of hearing impairment or language delay; and practical concerns about computer speech recognition and hearing aid design. Dr. Kluender is deeply committed to teaching, and has taught a wide array of courses—philosophical, psychological, and physiological.

Dennis M. Levi has taught at the University of California, Berkeley since 2001. He is Dean/Professor in the School of Optometry and Professor at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. In the lab, Dr. Levi and colleagues use psychophysics, computational modeling, and brain imaging (fMRI) to study the neural mechanisms of normal pattern vision in humans, and to learn how they are degraded by abnormal visual experience (amblyopia).

Linda M. Bartoshuk is Bushnell Professor, Department of Community Dentistry and Behavioral Science at the University of Florida. Her research on taste has opened up broad new avenues for further study, establishing the impact of both genetic and pathological variation in taste on food preferences, diet and health. She discovered that taste normally inhibits other oral sensations such that damage to taste leads to unexpected consequences like weight gain and intensified oral pain.

Rachel S. Herz is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School. Her research focuses on olfactory cognition and perception and the roles and features of emotion, memory, and language. Using an experimental approach grounded in evolutionary theory and incorporating both cognitive–behavioral and neuropsychological techniques, Dr. Herz aims to understand how biological mechanisms and cognitive processes interact to influence perception, cognition, and behavior.

Roberta L. Klatzky is Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also holds faculty appointments in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and the Human–Computer Interaction Institute. She has done extensive research on haptic and visual object recognition, space perception and spatial thinking, and motor performance. Her work has application to haptic interfaces, navigation aids for the blind, image-guided surgery, teleoperation, and virtual environments.

Susan J. Lederman is Professor of Psychology at Queen’s University, with cross-appointments in the School of Computing and in the Centre for Neuroscience. Her research interests span both perception and cognition, with particular emphases on psychophysics, haptic perception and recognition of objects and their underlying neural processes and representations, multisensory perception, and sensory-guided motor control. She has applied the results of her research to a number of real-world problems, including the design of haptic and multisensory interfaces for virtual environments and teleoperation.

Daniel M. Merfeld is an Associate Professor of Otology and Laryngology at the Harvard Medical School with cross-appointments at the Harvard–MIT Health, Science, and Technology program and the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Most of his research career has been spent studying how the brain combines information from multiple sources, with a specific focus on how the brain processes ambiguous sensory information from the vestibular system. Recent research includes work developing a vestibular implant for patients who have severe problems with their vestibular periphery.

NEW! eBook Options

New for the Second Edition, Sensation and Perception is also available as an eBook, at a substantial discount off the price of the printed textbook.

Interactive eBook (ISBN 978-0-87893-957-2)
www.sinauer.com/ebooks/wolfe2e
The interactive eBook features a wealth of interactive tools and resources. For instructors, the eBook offers an unprecedented opportunity to easily customize the textbook with the addition of notes, Web links, images, documents, and more. Students can readily bookmark pages, highlight text, add their own notes, and customize the display of the text. All of the Companion Website's resources are integrated into the eBook, so that students can easily access activities, essays, and more while reading the text.

CourseSmart eBook (ISBN 978-0-87893-937-4)
www.coursesmart.com/9780878939534
This basic eBook reproduces the look of the printed book exactly, and includes convenient tools for searching the text, highlighting, and adding notes.

For more information on either eBook, please contact Linda VandenDolder at vandendolder@sinauer.com.

Reviews and Commentary

“The interrelated phenomena of sensation and perception are fascinating subjects for students of the mind and brain. Sensation and Perception will draw students into the topic easily, luring them with engaging stories, colorful images, and fun demonstrations that will make them want to explore the brain‘s complex mechanisms for making sense of the world. … this is a welcome addition to the textbooks of similar vein, because it is fresh and friendly, and is stamped with the mark of its high-quality scientist authors.”
—Leslie P. Tolbert, The Quarterly Review of Biology

Media and Supplements

For the Student

Companion Website

The Sensation and Perception Companion Website (www.sinauer.com/wolfe2e) provides students with a wealth of study and review materials to help them master the important concepts covered in the textbook. The site includes the following resources:

Interactive Activities lead the student through important processes, phenomena, and structures (e.g., perception experiments, illusions, and models of cognitive processes).
Web Essays expand on selected topics from the textbook and provide additional coverage and examples.
Study Questions are designed to give students the opportunity to test their mastery of the important concepts, processes, and terminology presented in the chapter.
Key-Term Quizzes help the student master the hundreds of new terms introduced in the textbook.
Chapter Summary Activities provide a detailed overview of each chapter’s contents with a built-in fill-in-the-blanks exercise to check comprehension.

For the Instructor

Instructor’s Resource Library (ISBN 978-0-87893-955-8)

Available to qualified adopters, the Sensation and Perception IRL includes a variety of resources to aid in planning the course, presenting lectures, and assessing students. Contents include:

Textbook Figures and Tables: All of the figures (including photographs) and tables from the textbook, sized and color-adjusted for optimal legibility when projected.
PowerPoint^® Resources: Two presentations are provided for each chapter. One contains all of the chapter’s figures and tables, the other is a complete lecture presentation outline, with selected figures included.
Instructor’s Manual

Chapter Overview: The big-picture synopsis of what the chapter covers.
Chapter Outline: The outline structure of the chapter, including all headings.
Chapter Summary: A detailed breakdown of all the important concepts presented in the chapter.
Lecture Outline: A suggested lecture for each chapter, presented in a slide-by-slide format designed for use in PowerPoint presentations.
References for Lecture Development: A list of references for additional reading on the topics presented in each chapter.

Test Bank
Expanded for the Second Edition, the Test Bank offers a complete set of multiple-choice questions for each chapter of the textbook, provided in Microsoft^® Word^® format. Questions address the full range of material covered in each chapter; both factual recall and conceptual questions are included. Some questions also incorporate diagrams.

1. Introduction

Early Philosophy of Perception
Nativism and Empiricism

Nativism
Empiricism

The Dawn of Psychophysics

Psychophysical Methods
Signal Detection Theory

The Biology of Perception

Hermann von Helmholtz
Neuronal Connections
Neural Firing: The Action Potential

2. The First Steps in Vision: Seeing Stars

A Little Light Physics
Eyes That See Light

Shining Starlight onto the Retina
The Retina

Retinal Information Processing

Light Transduction by Rod and Cone Photoreceptors
Lateral Inhibition through Horizontal and Amacrine Cells
Convergence and Divergence of Information via Bipolar Cells
Communicating to the Brain via Ganglion Cells

Whistling in the Dark: Dark and Light Adaptation
The Man Who Could Not See Stars

3. Spatial Vision: From Stars to Stripes

Visual Acuity: Oh Say, Can You See?

A Visit to the Eye Doctor
Acuity for Low-Contrast Stripes
Why Sine Wave Gratings?

Retinal Ganglion Cells and Stripes
The Lateral Geniculate Nucleus
Striate Cortex

Cortical Topography and Cortical Magnification

Receptive Fields in Striate Cortex

Orientation Selectivity
Other Receptive-Field Properties
Simple and Complex Cells
Further Complications

Columns and Hypercolumns
Selective Adaptation: The Psychologist’s Electrode

Selective Adaptation for Spatial Frequencies
The Site of Selective Adaptation Effects
Combining Spatial Frequency and Orientation Selectivity
Spatial Frequency–Tuned Pattern Analyzers in Human Vision

The Development of Spatial Vision

Development of the Contrast Sensitivity Function

The Girl Who Almost Couldn’t See Stripes

4. Perceiving and Recognizing Objects

Middle Vision

Finding Edges
Texture Segmentation and Grouping
Perceptual Committees Revisited
Figure and Ground
Dealing with Occlusion
Parts and Wholes
Summarizing Middle Vision

Object Recognition

Templates versus Structural Descriptions
Problems with Structural-Description Theories
Multiple Recognition Committees?
Faces: An Illustrative Special Case
Objects in the Brain
Summarizing Object Recognition

5. The Perception of Color

Basic Principles of Color Perception

The Problem of Univariance

Trichromacy

Rods and Cones
Metamers
Lights, Filters, and Finger Paints
Three Numbers, Many Colors
History of Trichromatic Theory

Opponent Processes

Repackaging the Information
Opponent Cells in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus
Psychophysical Roots of Opponent Color Theory
Afterimages
Color in the Visual Cortex

Does Everyone See Colors the Same Way?

Does Everyone See Colors the Same Way?—Yes
Does Everyone See Colors the Same Way?—No
Does Everyone See Colors the Same Way?—Maybe

From the Color of Lights to a World of Color

Color Constancy
The Problem with the Illuminant
Physical Constraints Make Constancy Possible
Color Vision in Animals

6. Space Perception and Binocular Vision

Monocular Cues to Three-Dimensional Space

Occlusion
Size and Position Cues
Aerial Perspective
Linear Perspective
Pictorial Depth Cues and Pictures
Motion Cues
Accommodation and Convergence

Binocular Vision and Stereopsis

Stereoscopes and Stereograms
Random Dot Stereograms
Stereoscopic Correspondence
The Physiological Basis of Stereopsis

Combining Depth Cues

The Bayesian Approach
Illusions and the Construction of Space
Binocular Rivalry and Suppression

Development of Binocular Vision and Stereopsis

Abnormal Visual Experience Can Disrupt Binocular Vision

7. Motion Perception

Computation of Visual Motion

Apparent Motion
The Correspondence and Aperture Problems
Detection of Global Motion in Area MT
Motion Aftereffects Revisited
Second-Order Motion

Using Motion Information

Going with the Flow: Using Motion Information to Navigate
Something in the Way You Move: Using Motion Information to Identify Objects
Avoiding Imminent Collision: The Tao of Tau

Eye Movements

Physiology and Types of Eye Movements
Eye Movements and Reading
Saccadic Suppression and the Comparator

Development of Motion Perception
The Man Who Couldn’t See Motion

8. Attention and Scene Perception

Selection in Space

The “Spotlight” of Attention

Visual Search

Feature Searches Are Efficient
Many Searches Are Inefficient
In Real-World Searches, Basic Features Guide Visual Search
The Binding Problem in Visual Search

Attending in Time: RSVP and the Attentional Blink
The Physiological Basis of Attention

Attention Could Enhance Neural Activity
Attention Could Enhance the Processing of a Specific Type of Stimulus
Attention and Single Cells

Disorders of Visual Attention

Neglect
Extinction
Balint Syndrome

Perceiving and Understanding Scenes

Picture Memory and Change Blindness
Local and Global Approaches to Scene Recognition
What Do We Actually See?

9. Hearing: Physiology and Psychoacoustics

The Function of Hearing
What Is Sound?

Basic Qualities of Sound Waves: Frequency and Amplitude
Sine Waves, Complex Tones, and Fourier Analysis

Basic Structure of the Mammalian Auditory System

Outer Ear
Middle Ear
Inner Ear
The Auditory Nerve
Auditory Brain Structures

Basic Operating Characteristics of the Auditory System

Intensity and Loudness
Frequency and Pitch

Hearing Loss

10. Hearing in the Environment

Sound Localization

Interaural Time Difference
Interaural Level Difference
Cones of Confusion
Pinna and Head Cues
Auditory Distance Perception

Complex Sounds

Harmonics
Timbre
Attack and Decay

Spatial, Spectral, and Temporal Segregation
Grouping by Timbre
Grouping by Onset

Continuity and Restoration Effects

Restoration of Complex Sounds

11. Music and Speech Perception

Music

Musical Notes
Making Music

Speech

Speech Production
Speech Perception
Learning to Listen
Speech in the Brain

12. Touch

Touch Physiology

The Sense Organ and Receptors for Touch
From Skin to Brain
Pain
Pleasant Touch

Tactile Sensitivity and Acuity

How Sensitive Are We to Mechanical Pressure?
How Finely Can We Resolve Spatial Details?
How Finely Can We Resolve Temporal Details?

Haptic Perception

erception for Action
Action for Perception
The What System of Touch: Perceiving Objects and Their Properties
The Where System of Touch: Locating Objects Tactile Spatial Attention
Interactions between Touch and Other Modalities
Virtual Haptic Environments

13. Olfaction

Olfactory Physiology

Odors and Odorants
The Human Olfactory Apparatus
The Genetic Basis of Olfactory Receptors
The Feel of Scent

From Chemicals to Smells

Theories of Olfactory Perception
The Importance of Patterns
Odor Mixtures
Odor Imagery

Olfactory Psychophysics, Identification, and Adaptation

Detection, Discrimination, and Recognition
Psychophysical Methods for Detection and Discrimination
Identification
Adaptation
Cognitive Habituation

Olfactory Hedonics

Familiarity and Intensity
Nature or Nurture?
An Evolutionary Argument
Caveats

Olfaction, Memory, and Emotion

Neuroanatomical and Evolutionary Connections between Odor and Emotion
The Vomeronasal Organ and the Question of Human Pheromones

14. Taste

Taste versus Flavor

Localizing Flavor Sensations

Anatomy and Physiology of the Gustatory System

Papillae
Taste Buds and Taste Receptor Cells
Taste Processing in the Central Nervous System

The Four Basic Tastes

Salty
Sour
Bitter
Sweet
Survival Value of Taste

The Pleasures of Taste

Specific Hungers
The Special Case of Umami
The Special Case of Fat

Coding of Taste Quality

Taste Adaptation and Cross-Adaptation

Genetic Variation in Taste Experience

Supertasters
Health Consequences of Taste Sensation
Pleasure and Retronasal versus Orthonasal Olfaction
Chili Peppers

15. Spatial Orientation and the Vestibular System

Modalities and Qualities of Spatial Orientation

Three Spatial Orientation Modalities: Angular Motion, Linear Motion, and Tilt
Basic Qualities of Spatial Orientation: Direction and Amplitude

Peripheral Structure of the Mammalian Vestibular System

Hair Cells—Mechanical Transducers
Semicircular Canals
Otolith Organs

Spatial Orientation Perception

Rotation Perception
Translation Perception
Tilt Perception

Sensory Integration

Visual-Vestibular Integration
Canal-Otolith Integration

Reflexive Vestibular Responses

Vestibulo-Ocular Responses
Vestibulo-Autonomic Responses
Vestibulo-Spinal Responses

Cortical Projections

Pricing and Options

Titles	Product Code	Price (USD)
Sensation & Perception, Second Edition Interactive eBook - purchase via Kagi.com	978-0-87893-957-2	$66.95		Request Exam Copy
Coursesmart Ebook - purchase or request exam copy via CourseSmart.	978-0-87893-937-4	$66.95
Sensation and Perception, Second Edition Interactive eBook with PsyCog Bundle available in US and Canada only. This bundle includes: Sensation & Perception, Second Edition PsyCog: Explorations in Perception and Cognition	978-0-87893-958-9	$91.20	Purchase	Request Exam Copy
Sensation and Perception, Second Edition	978-0-87893-953-4	$110.95	Purchase	Request Exam Copy
Sensation and Perception, Second Edition bundled with PsyCog Bundle available in US and Canada only. This bundle includes: Sensation & Perception, Second Edition PsyCog: Explorations in Perception and Cognition	978-0-87893-956-5	$124.10	Purchase	Request Exam Copy
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