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Essentials of Sensation and Perception

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Series: Foundations of Psychology.

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.

Table of Contents

1. Sensory Reception. 2. Sensory Pathways and Cortical Processing. 3. The Senses and the Brain. 4. Psychophysics. 5. Perception as Information Processing. 6. Population Codes in Sensory Processing. 7. Perceptual Inference. 8. Multi-sensory Processing. 9. Consciousness and Perception. 10. Summary and Future Directions.

Reviews

"No other sensation and perception text offers a similar integrative overview of the issues general to all of the senses. I applaud the extensive detail used by the author in this brief text, and I believe that this treatment is a necessary one." – Matthew I. Isaak, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA

"This book is direct, lucid and makes complicated ideas and concepts comprehensible. It packs a lot of information into a small space, and will be useful to students who need a quick, easy-to-use text on the senses." – G. Neil Martin, Reader in Psychology and Director, Human Olfaction Laboratory, University of Middlesex, UK