Review of Sensation and Perception. Jeremy M. Wolfe et al

Jeremy Wolfe, a professor at Harvard and team leader on this multiauthored introduction to human sensation and perception, is best known in his research community for the colorful way in which he delivers lectures at scholarly conferences. It is not unusual for the audience at one of his sessions to swell to standing room only immediately before he makes his presentation and then to dissipate again shortly thereafter. Many in the audience are not even deeply interested in the details of his topic. Yet they come because what they have learned to expect from Professor Wolfe is a presentation that is colorful, to the point, and above all entertaining. As one of the world's top researchers in the area of human visual attention, Jeremy Wolfe's presentations are also filled with substance. His day-to-day work encompasses the important and yet largely still unanswered questions of how we know the meaning of an object when we see it and how the human brain copes with an overload of sensory information. He is famous for starting controversies among his colleagues and sometimes even entirely new lines of research by simply asking direct questions about the assumptions that they and others take for granted. In Sensation and Perception, Professor Wolfe has brought both of his formidable sets of talents—namely, skilled communication and sharp thinking—to bear on the problem of how to tell undergraduate students about the world of human sensory systems and perceptual experience. Two features will immediately strike anyone familiar with previous textbooks in this area as distinctive. First, the text is interspersed, cover to cover, with colorful illustrations. This is a first for this area. Previously, textbook publishers in the behavioral and life sciences have only been willing to spend the resources necessary for a full color presentation on very large enrollment courses such as Introduction to Biology or Psychology. Among the only in-depth area survey textbooks previously given a similar treatment have been Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology. Sensation and Perception was thought to be too small a market to be worth the effort. But to what extent has this been a self-fulfilling prophecy, as many instructors like to argue? Many of them have said enrollments are lower, in part, because the subject matter in perception did not jump off the page as readily for students. Wolfe's text will now let the necessary experiment be run in the natural world. I'm sure there are many instructors who will welcome this text for that reason alone. For the first time they will be fully assisted by a textbook that helps them give life to material they already felt passionately about. A second distinctive feature is evident on the cover. There are a total of seven coauthors on this text, and each one of them is a leading researcher in a sensory subsystem, ranging from vision and audition to touch, smell, and taste. As a result, each of the chapters, while necessarily covering the familiar territory of a survey textbook, has plenty of freshness in its look and feel. This is not the tired rehashing of material traditionally found in many perception textbooks. Each chapter refers to contemporary research, and the descriptions of current controversies have a contemporary ring to them. Also to their credit, the Wolfe team has managed to speak in a fairly unified voice. There are inevitable slips, but readers should not underestimate the difficulty of smoothing the text when seven egos and distinctive writing styles are in play. I can't be sure, of course, but I think I can hear the anecdotes in Professor Wolfe's voice in each chapter. As an example of this, consider the way that the problem of selective visual attention is introduced in chapter 8. It begins by acknowledging that the student reader is likely very busy and then offers a simple idea: “Why not read two books at the same time?” The obvious problem of the limited visual acuity of the eye is first acknowledged and then overcome with a demonstration the students can try for themselves, involving two lines of large text that pose no acuity problems. Even with the acuity problem solved, readers will find that only one event or object (in this case, one line of text) can be entertained in consciousness at a time. This opens the door to describing the rich world of modern research on the mental limitations in our ability to drive and hold phone conversations at the same time and to search for loved ones in an airport. In chapter 14 on taste, there is an equally engaging discussion of the genetic basis of how taste sensitivity varies in the population, with some of us being “supertasters,” and therefore highly sensitive to certain trace chemicals in food, while the rest of us are “nontasters” and thus never quite certain what all the fuss is about. The single greatest strength of this textbook lies in its accessibility to a wide audience of readers interested in an introduction to the study of human sensory systems. This had been accomplished by (in addition to the superbly crafted color figures already mentioned) largely stripping the text of all scholarly references. When experimental results are described in order to establish a point, only very generic tones and descriptions are given. This means that in order to use this textbook for an upper-level course or a small-enrollment course in which research is the focus, an instructor will want to supplement it with a more rigorous book or with readings from primary sources. The book is also surprisingly short for a treatment of all five senses, coming in at just over 400 pages. Whether this represents strength or weakness will depend on your perspective. Students and many professors will welcome the brevity because it contributes to the overall accessibility of the material, but there will also be research-oriented teachers who are disappointed that their favorite topics are not covered. Speaking personally, I was surprised to find that visual object recognition, visual imagery, and the scientific study of consciousness were almost entirely absent in the treatment. But I can also imagine the hard choices that had to be made to keep the book within its page limits. When it comes to the so-called minor senses of touch, smell, and taste, I think it is safe to say that this is the most up-to-date introduction currently available. No competing textbook comes close to being as current or as well structured in its presentation of these sensory systems and their function. I expect that students will enjoy the companion Web site to this text (www.sinauer.com/wolfe/) and that instructors will welcome the accompanying Instructor's Resource CD (ISBN 0-87893-939-3), which includes an Instructor's Manual to help in course development and a Test Bank to aid in student assessment.

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