About The Book

This book was remixed and edited by Dr. Jill Grose-Fifer of John Jay College, CUNY. Much of the original content was created by the students at the University of Minnesota in their PSY 3031: Sensation and Perception course and edited by their instructor, Dr. Cheryl Olman, as a class project, because there is no existing open-source textbook for Sensation and Perception. Content is, for the most part, re-used and re-mixed from existing open-source materials from Psychology and Anatomy textbooks.

The course has two over-arching themes or guiding principles, both of which rest on the basic understanding that perception is an interpretive act, which means that our perceptions are sometimes only loosely based on our sensory experiences:

• Our brains shape our environment: there are many things that we simply do not perceive because we are not prepared to perceive them.
• Our environments shape our brains: color categories and phonetic boundaries are just two examples of how our conscious access to sensory information is limited by the culture we grew up in.