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This is an advanced theoretical-experimental treatise on the perceptual act and on perceptual learning. The title is not exactly
precise, for only a chapter is allotted to changes 'as the child grows older' and there is no account of, or accounting for, the various idiosyncratic or societal worlds, or cognitive styles, which are created.
For its purpose, it is an excellent book, for it coördinates the farflung research material of the psychological laboratory and the insights of the conceptualizers into a comprehensive and modest point of view on learning and perception. The perceptual act is schematized in this sequence: expectation of stimulation® attending® reception® trial-and-check, along with autonomic and proprioceptive arousal and feedback® final structuring of the percept. Separate chapters survey the evidence pertinent to each stage.
The psychoanalytic practitioner will have special interest in the chapter on autonomic arousal and feedback, and in the one on the place of consciousness and conscious meaning in perception. Psychoanalytic sources, especially Rapaport, G. S. Klein, Braatöy, Schilder, Freud's famous Chapter Seven, and others, are drawn upon freely.