Fundamentals Of Sensation And Perception

The new edition of this successful book provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the sensory systems--vision, audition, touch, taste, and smell. In each case the neural machinery relating sensation and perception is described and integrated with the physiological underpinning.This edition includes a CD which provides demonstrations and simulations to explain and clarify the perceptual phenomena.

This textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the sensory processes leading to perception, with an emphasis on the physiological bases for the phenomena. The visual system is discussed in depth, with parallels drawn in subsequent treatments of the auditory system, somatosensory and pain systems, gustatory system, and olfactory system. In each case, the discussion begins with the physical stimulus, progresses through anatomy and physiology, and concludes with perceptual phenomenology.The intent is to be scholarly but accessible, engaging the undergraduate student with real-life examples and demonstrations while providing a firm stepping-off point for advanced students. This edition includes a CD containing a computer program that provides demonstrations and simulations to explain, clarify and make accessible phenomena normally confined to the laboratory.

Signals and Perception provides a coherent survey of our understanding of how we interact with the environment via our senses. Offering a unified treatment of the senses - hearing and balance, vision, touch and pain, smell and taste - and assuming little prior knowledge of the field, the text should be useful for students on a wide variety of courses, in psychology, biology and neuroscience.

The study of sensation and perception looks at how we acquire, process, and interpret information about the outside world. By describing key ideas from first principles, this straightforward introduction provides easy access to the basic concepts in the subject, and incorporates the most recent advances with useful historical background. The text takes a uniquely integrative approach, highlighting fundamental findings that apply across all the senses - including vision, hearing, touch, pain, balance, smell and taste - rather than considering each sense in isolation. Several pedagogical features help students to engage with the material. ‘Key Term’ and ‘Key Concept’ boxes describe technical terms and concepts whilst ‘Question’ boxes relate the material to everyday questions about perception. Each chapter ends with suggestions for further reading, and the final chapter draws together the material from the previous chapters, summarizing the broad principles described, and outlining some major unresolved issues. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book is an accessible and up-to-date overview of the processes of human sensation and perception. Presented in full color, it is an ideal introduction for pre-undergraduate and first year undergraduate students on courses in psychology, as well as neuroscience and biology.

Do you wonder how movies – sequences of static frames – appear to move, or why 3-D films look different from traditional movies? Why does ventriloquism work, and why can airliner flights make you feel disoriented? The answers to these and other questions about the human senses can be found within the pages of Foundations of Sensation and Perception. This third edition maintains the standard for clarity and accessibility combined with rigor which was set in previous editions, making it suitable for a wide range of students. As in the previous editions, the early chapters allow students to grasp fundamental principles in relation to the relatively simple sensory systems (smell, taste, touch and balance) before moving on to more complex material in hearing and vision. The text has been extensively updated, and this new edition includes: a new chapter devoted to attention and perception over 200 new references over 30 new figures and improved, more colorful, visual presentation a new companion website with a range of resources for students and lecturers The book contains a range of pedagogical features, including tutorial sections at the end of each chapter. This distinctive feature introduces areas of the subject which are rarely included in student texts, but are crucial for establishing a firm foundation of knowledge. Some tutorials are devoted to more advanced and technical topics (optics, light measurement, Bayesian inference), but treated in an accessible manner, while others cover topics a little outside of the mainstream (music perception, consciousness, visual art). Foundations of Sensation and Perception will enable the reader to achieve a firm grasp of current knowledge concerning the processes that underlie our perception of the world and will be an invaluable resource for those studying psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines.

This comprehensive introduction to the senses explains how physical stimuli are transformed into signals in the nervous system and how the brain uses those signals to understand the world. Whereas most texts in the field begin by covering vision, this trailblazing work offers students a solidgrounding in the principles of perceptual measurement and the biological mechanisms that make perception possible before introducing the somatosensory and then the olfactory system. This innovative presentation ensures that students have a firm grasp of the basics before they approach thecomplexities of hearing and vision, making Fundamentals of Sensory Perception an indispensable introduction to sensation and perception.