Visual Perception: Essential Readings. Steven Yantis, ed. Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2000. Pages: 432. Price: 64. 95 (hardback), 34. 95 (softback). ISBN: 0-86377-597-7, 0-86377-598-5. This book is a collection of short- to medium-length articles and essays by the most influential authors in the field of visual perception. It is intended as a textbook for a graduate or advanced undergraduate course on visual perception, and it should fill that role admirably because of its scope. While its choice of topics is decidedly contemporary (a different constellation of topics would have been chosen only ten years ago), the readings include classics that have stood the test of considerable time. The readings should be accessible to graduate students who have little prior background beyond an introductory visual perception course such as that included as part of the standard optometry curriculum. Yantis provides a short introduction that places each reading in its historical or theoretical context and outlines briefly why it has been influential. An appendix provides guidance on reading modern journal articles on cognitive psychology (or just about any other topic). The anthology begins with five readings that describe important theoretical approaches to visual perception. These are von Helmholtz on visual perception, Tanner and Swets on Signal Detection Theory, H. B. Barlow on single neural units and visual perception, J. J. Gibson on “ecological optics, ” and the first chapter of David Marr's important book, Vision. These together describe the fundamental ideas upon which modern visual perception is based. I hope that students will read these first, as Yantis intended, even though they will not be fully understandable until after the student has learned more about visual perception. This is important because many of the unspoken assumptions underlying the empirical readings are outlined here. The second group of articles are gathered under the rubric “Early Vision, ” by which he means the relatively well-understood physiology of the ascending visual pathway up through the visual association cortex. My choice of articles would have been different from his, in that I would have included an article on the classical “Young–Helmholtz” view of trichromacy. The reason to teach students about early vision, in my opinion, is so that they understand not only the concept of the receptive field, but also how a few, coarsely tuned receptive fields can nevertheless mediate fine discriminations between stimuli. The simplest sensory system that accomplishes this is human color vision, where a wavelength discrimination threshold of as little as 2 nm is achieved using signals originating in visual pigments whose bandwidths are on the order of 100 nm. This theme could be carried forward by including Tanaka's classic article 1 on specialized cells in the infratemporal cortex that respond selectively to complex visual patterns. The third group of articles are on “perceptual organization and constancy. ” This is a vast topic, and one that I might have covered a little differently. Yantis has chosen to make it an introduction to gestalt psychology, which is a perfectly fine way of covering it. I would have replaced one of the articles on “achromatic colors” with an article on color constancy, a field in which there has been important progress in the last 20 years, progress that has occurred partly because of a change in approach initiated by Laurence Maloney and Brian Wandell 2 (reviewed in Reference 3). The fourth group of articles are on “object and spatial vision, ” which is really two groups. Three of the articles are classics on “object and spatial vision”: the original “coherent plaid” paper (Adelson and Movshon), the “mental rotation” paper (Shepard and Metzler), and a discussion of Biederman's 3-D “recognition by components” theory. The other three articles are on the topic of the dorsal and ventral streams and could have been combined with later readings on “blind-sight” (the classic article of Weiskrantz, Warrington, Sanders and Marshall), and cortical organization (of Scheinberg and Logothetis). The fifth group are readings on “Visual Attention and Awareness, ” which is Yantis’ own specialty, and seem well-chosen to me. Yantis is to be respected for his self-restraint in omitting the opportunity to add his own classic papers on the voluntary allocation and control of attention. The quibbles I have listed above are not intended as a serious criticism of this collection. They stem from the fact that different professors have different ideas about what is important. Most professors would probably want to supplement this book with readings of his/her own, but this book would be an excellent basic text for a course on visual perception in any graduate program in physiological optics/vision science. It also would be an excellent reference for anyone working in related fields who wanted to have the classics at hand.
Angela M. Brown (Wed,) studied this question.