Levine and Shefner's Fundamentals of Sensation and Perception, 3rd Ed. Michael W. Levine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pages: 608 + CD-ROM. Price: 75. 00. ISBN 0-19-852467-6. This text is a revision of the popular book introduced by Levine and Shefner two decades ago. As in the previous editions that were coauthored with Jeremy Shefner, Levine has attempted to provide an informative and inclusive text to be used in undergraduate perception courses. The text is both highly informative and comprehensive and certainly emerges as one of the best perception texts available. A CD ROM is included that contains many useful demos that will certainly help in explaining difficult concepts. Nonetheless, the text suffers from some of the same drawbacks shared with other texts in this area. There is a thorough discussion of psychophysical methods in Chapter 2. Treatment of other methodologies (e. g. , genetics and electrophysiology) is, however, left to be discussed in context. This decision is surprising considering the increasing importance of modern methodologies such as brain imaging in the studies of perception. Treatment of light and physiological optics is standard and adequate. Discussion of the retina and visual pathways is also well done except that some recent advances have not been noted (e. g. , S-cone “off” pathways) and result in some errors that are hard to ignore. These types of errors, however, must be forgiven given the impossibility of creating such a comprehensive text that is still completely up to date at the time of final publication. Discussion of vision is divided up into reasonable capacities such as adaptation, form perception, movement, and depth, with color vision being treated last. In evaluating textbooks, the opinions of instructors are often colored by the chapters on topics with which they are most familiar. In reading the color chapter, I was disappointed to see the treatment of color vision as almost an add-on capacity. Many of us who teach perception find it useful to introduce mechanisms of color vision early in the course because the theories and models are well worked out and concepts such as inhibition, opponency, and univariance have obvious importance in the discussion of neural systems in general. There was also a distressing failure to attend to some details that were nonetheless deemed worthy of mention. For example, New and Old World monkeys were confused and secondary rather than primary work was cited in a “box” that attempted to cover animal color vision in two paragraphs. I can only hope that this level of inattention does not apply to the majority of the text. Discussion of the auditory system was also as complete as required for an introductory class. It was well organized with appropriate importance placed on speech perception. The importance of “top down” processing was also made explicit if one chose to read the extra boxes. The inclusion of additional chapters on olfaction, taste, and the somatic senses was also welcome. The treatment of these topics was, of course, necessarily brief yet comprehensive, exactly what one hopes for in an introductory text. The text includes a large number of optional boxes that were to be treated as hyperlinks by the reader. That is, to be read if more depth or additional detail were desired. However, I felt that this organization was distracting because it created frequent side trips and interrupted progressive flow. Most of the information in the boxes could have been included in the main text as part of the general information. The use of these boxes may have been an attempt to make the text usable for both introductory and more advanced levels, a lofty goal for a single text. The above criticism highlights a major drawback of this text that is shared with most other perception texts. Over the years, perception texts have become more and more detailed (and longer) with apparently little regard for actual use in the classroom. Inevitably, the instructor must pick and choose chapters to present and some to omit. What is lacking is a comprehensive but concise treatment of perception wherein the student is left with some meaningful “wholistic” concept of how the different sensory modalities function. Instead, the student is left with more detailed and isolated ideas about how certain sensory capacities (e. g. , frequency analysis and motion detection) might work and large gaps where the instructor has had to drop a chapter or topic. Textbook authors need to look functionally at the design of texts so that the complete topic (text) may be taught in a semester or even a quarter period without large gaps. Obviously, the 20 chapters in the present text could not reasonably be taught in one semester at the introductory level where students often take a full lecture to grasp fundamental concepts such as “lateral inhibition” or “receptive field. ” Success requires a judicial choice of material and a willingness to be initially criticized for a less in-depth treatment. This instructor would gladly give up some depth in the topics to have a more usable text for introductory perception classes. Intermediate classes in more specialized areas such as “vision” could nicely make use of the more detailed and comprehensive treatments found in Levine's text.
Michael A. Crognale (Fri,) studied this question.