Sensation and Perception

This book tells the amazing story of perception -- how experiences are created by your senses and how you use these experiences to interact with the environment. You might be surprised to know that although perception is easy -- we see, hear, feel touch, and experience taste and smell without much effort -- the mechanisms that create perceptions are both extremely complex and hidden from our view. SENSATION AND PERCEPTION unravels these complexities by taking you on a journey that describes perceptual research in a clear easy-to-understand way, and by linking the results of this research to your everyday experience. The text is supported by beautiful color illustrations, a media program that makes perception come alive (in the MindTap digital learning solution), and learning aids to help you understand and remember what you have read.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction to Perception. 2. The Beginnings of the Perceptual Process. 3. Neural Processing 4. Cortical Organization. 5. Perceiving Objects and Scenes. 6. Visual Attention. 7. Taking Action. 8. Perceiving Motion. 9. Perceiving Color. 10. Perceiving Depth and Size. 11. Hearing I: Basic Processes and Pitch Perception. 12. Hearing II: Localization and Organization. 13. Speech Perception. 14. The Cutaneous Senses. 15. The Chemical Senses. Appendix A: Methods of Adjustment and Constant Stimuli. Appendix B: The Difference Threshold. Appendix C: Magnitude Estimation and The Power Function. Appendix D: The Signal Detection Approach.

About the Author :
BRUCE GOLDSTEIN is Associate Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. He has received the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Pittsburgh for his classroom teaching and textbook writing. He received his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Tufts University and his PhD in experimental psychology from Brown University; he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Biology Department at Harvard University before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. Bruce has published papers on a wide variety of topics, including retinal and cortical physiology, visual attention, and the perception of pictures. He is the author of SENSATION AND PERCEPTION, 9th Edition (Cengage, 2014), and the editor of the BLACKWELL HANDBOOK OF PERCEPTION (Blackwell, 2001) and the two-volume SAGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PERCEPTION (Sage, 2010).