Catalog

This book was created by the students of PSY 3031: Sensation and Perception, as a class project, because there is no existing open-source textbook for S&P. Content is, for the most part, re-used and re-mixed from existing open-source materials from Psychology and Anatomy textbooks. We needed to do this project because we need a resource that goes into greater depth than the Sensation and Perception sections of introductory psychology textbooks. We also wanted to create a resource with a stronger neuroscience foundation than your average psychology textbook, with strong links between physiology and perception. The final product will always be a work in progress, but hopefully a useful collection of materials to support college-level courses that want to understand how human physiology supports human perceptual experiences.

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.

This book was edited for an upper-division writing-intensive course centered on major issues of culture in the context of the Spanish-speaking world. It is not a history of civilization, nor is it a survey of either Latin American or Peninsular literature. Rather, our objective here is to familiarize ourselves with the different issues central to the development of the Hispanic world as a cultural entity, and to practice analyzing and questioning received notions of culture in this context. We will examine all sorts of texts--literary, visual, musical, and filmic--from all periods of both Latin American (including Brazil) and Peninsular history, reading them through the lens of a series of topics found below. The materials were compiled, edited, and written by the instructors from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota -Twin Cities. With this publication, we wish to make this book available to any equivalent courses at other institutions.