Seeing (Handbook of Perception and Cognition)

Rating:
Summary: Better Titled "Low Level Vision"
Review: The book was dissapointing in scope. It is primarily a rehash of information on low-level visual processing (e.g., retinal image formation, ganglion cells, spatial and temporal processing in the striate cortex). The book does little to address the cognitive processes in vision (e.g., visual learning, the role of prior visual images in scene segmentation and object recognition, or the perception of 3-dimensional form). To illustrate the narrow scope, in the entire book, there is only one plate with a photograph of a natural scene (and that appears in the chapter on retinal image formation to illustrate blur and sampling). All of the other stimuli are simple artificial shapes and patterns. The sections are generally good in covering the designated topic, but the choice of topics provides a very limited and narrow selection. Most dissapointing perhaps was the lack of a broad roadmap of perceptual and cognitive processes in vision, showing what topics would and would not be covered in the book. Interested readers might be better served with "Vision Science: Photons to Phenomonology" by Palment or "Foundations of Vision" by Wandell or "Human Color Vision" by Kaiser and Boynton.