Sensation & Perception

This book is very thorough but not tedious. Illustrations and diagrams provide excellent learning aids.

pretty good book for the sensation and perception class i took at UCLA provides good examples, 1). its very to-the point 2). illustrations are really helpful for understanding stuff 3). very well written, easy to understand 4). pretty short :)

This is an excellent book. It was the course book for a graduate level course in Sensation and Perception that I took. Despite my fears (I have no Biology or Psychology background), this book made all the difference. What makes it so good is the fact that its both comprehensive, in depth and current (It's a fast moving field), yet it's written for people, not for academic material chewing robots. The text is fluent, simple, with explanations of non-trivial terms on the side notes. The writers occasionally use jokes and different tricks to make the material understandable and keep the reader entertained, but they don't overdo it. Perfect balance. I would actually recommend this book even for non-academics. If you're interested in Cognitive Science in general and Sensation and Perception specifically, make it your first introduction to the field (along with "The man who mistook his wife for a hat"). It's just too good to be left for the small few who happen to study Cognitive Science.

At last! A book I completely understand about perception. It also has a website which completes the learning effectively.

This is the Sensation and Perception textbook that I have fervently hoped for, and dreamed of, for years. Shouldn't a book on S & P bathe, dazzle and seduce the senses? Shouldn't it entertain and mesmerize its audience with illusions, effects, aftereffects, animations, classic experiments, art, music, historical images, brain imaging, and other sensual demos? The book is alive with colorful and informative visuals leaping off nearly every page. When used along with the remarkable student website (no extra charge) and Wyttenbach's forthcoming PsyCog CD-ROM (a few dollars extra), anyone can sense, perceive and *feel* the glorious phenomena that make our field so intriguing. How easy is it to teach an S & P class using this textbook? Sinauer provides an instructor's resource CD that provides the foundation for a first-rate course. Powerpoint presentations are provided for all 14 chapters, along with lecture notes that incorporate the authors' suggestions for how to present the material (Word and PDF formats). Obviously, instructors will want to modify these materials considerably, but it is nice to have a well-conceived preparation available. Every figure from the text is provided in digital format, and this is especially useful given the quality of the illustrations. If you feel like you need more, there are plenty of sources online and elsewhere. Consider using video clips from Zimbardo's Discovering Psychology series or from Insight Media's film collection, or go to Viperlib.com for plenty of clips and images. Starting with, or switching to, this text should be pretty easy for most instructors. Will psychology students enjoy this textbook? I think so. I showed Wolfe et al. to students in my most recent Cognitive Psychology class at UCSD, and they were nearly unanimous in preferring Wolfe et al. to other S & P texts. The other texts I showed them included some well-written classics that have been popular with students for years: Coren et al, Goldstein, Sekuler and Blake, Matlin & Foley, Schiffman, Levine. Students preferred the colorful pictures and diagrams in Wolfe et al. I think the publishers of the other texts have failed to fully appreciate that most students are "visual learners" and so they have missed the boat by not going all-out on the visual presentation. (I really hope they keep pace.) The text of Wolfe et al. seems very student-friendly to me, and the students I know who are using it in another class say it is OK. It integrates popular culture and the authors seem aware that many of their readers are in their teens and early twenties. I should note that Wolfe in particular is a master teacher who has won teaching awards at MIT and Harvard. Will non-psychology students enjoy this textbook? The first 8 chapters (200 pages) provide an extensive introduction to visual processing, so I think vision scientists (and especially grad students) will find plenty of interest. I can imagine portions of this textbook being u