Aspects of Aesthetics by Goran Hermeren (review)

point out the grids shown by stone-slabs, and over them the carving of forms conforming to a vitalistic exuberance, images as containers of space themselves. Owing to this, the forthcoming forms simultaneously diminish going back to the primeval source. This ‘breathing’ is the true manifestation of Muyo. Reviewed by Om. D. Upadhya, T.H.3 University Campus, Udaipur, India 313001. Sensation and Perception, Second Ed. E. Bruce Goldstein. Wadsworth Publishing Company, California, 1984. 48 Ipp., illus. ISBN: 0-53403035 -1. This introductory level college textbook is organized well, written in an enjoyablefashion and \,should be of general interest because it describes contemporary psychological views about $ow we gain knowledge of the world around’us. The author does not explicitly state his assumptions but he is clearly in the mainstream of current psychological thinking in that he believes studying the workings of the brain will eventually tell us how we gain knowledge of our surroundings. The major theme of this book is to combine evidencefrom psychological tests on humans with physiological experiments on animals in order to determine how perception is built up. The author succinctly describes the methods used in this research, the nature of the evidence gathered, and how this evidence was interpreted . Furthermore, the reader is able to perform a number of perceptual experiments firsthand using illustrations from the text and items readily available around the house. In these ways this book does not set itself apart from other introductory textbooks on this subject. This recently released second edition is, however, one of the most up-to-date texts in the field. This book does have a number of shortcomings. First, the author does not present a balanced view on the subject of attention: our ability to limit the amount of information of which we are aware. The author dedicates about a page to the view that we ‘take in’ little information from unattended stimuli and gives less than one paragraph to the opposing view that unattended stimuli are processed a great deal by the nervous system even though weareunawareofthem.This bias probably reflects the author’s lack of familiarity with contemporary research on attention. Since the section on attention takes up only a tiny fraction of the book, however, this bias is not of great concern. Second, I sometimes felt that the author was more concerned with providing perceptual experiments the reader could experience than with providing an understanding of what was being demonstrated . For instance, the reader is able to demonstrate for himself a perceptual effect first demonstrated by Blakemore and Sutton in 1969. The author then writes, “we will not go into the detail here., . ” and so misses a chance to link current ideas about neural organization with the reader’s perceptual experience. The author may have presented so many demonstrations without going into details in order to keep the reader’s interest. Third, because of the wording chosen by the author it appears that some of the statements in the book aren’t true. For instance, the author writes, “ ...[the] differences in rodand cone sensitivity are due to differences in the way the rods and cones are connected to other cells in the retina.” Contrary to what the author has written, contemporary evidence indicates that individual rods are more sensitive than individual cones because of differences in the sensitivities of their photopigments and because cones require light to enter the eye almost straight on while rods do not. I’m sure that the author does not mean what he has written. Indeed, this problem arises because the author has two different meanings for the words ‘rods’ and ‘cones’. In one sense he means the rods and cones themselves, but in another sense he means the system of neurons to which the rods and cones are connected. This book reviews a massive amount of research on perception. 1 think that the author has tried to make the learning of this information enjoyable. Overall, although the author’s choice of words sometimes leads to confusion, the book is a reliable source for information in this field. Reviewed by Jeffrey Moran, Laboratory of Neuropsychology, NIMH, Bldg. 9, Rm. 1N107, Bethesda, MD 20205, U.S.A. Aspects...