Customer Reviews

Neurobiology of Attention

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This volume gets most of its points for being comprehensive. The idea is nice: 109 (!) short chapters, each briefly summarizing a different research program related to attention. A great way to quickly get a bird's eye view of current attention research. It has some shortcomings, however, and they are hard for me to forgive, given the book's phenomenal cost. Some of the chapters, I feel, are a bit too brief, almost tossed off. Part of the problem may be that I read the book cover-to-cover, when really it's supposed be used as a kind of reference manual/ jumping-off-point-into-the-literature. Used this way, I imagine that the incompleteness of some chapters might be less bothersome.

A more personal criticism is that there are too many fMRI papers. I find it difficult to use fMRI data to constrain or arrive at mechanistic hypotheses about how brains actually work. I can't hold this against the editors (much), because the book's purpose is to represent current research comprehensively, and fMRI is big. Still, if you have as much trouble interpreting fMRI data as I do, it's another reason the book may afford you less than $150 dollars worth of enlightenment.

Finally, it may not be an ideal choice for students, despite a claim to the contrary on the back cover-- the papers can be very terse, and many assume background knowledge that initiates won't have. Still, there probably is not a more complete, up-to-date sampling of current attention research available between two covers, so it MAY be worth having despite it's flaws if you're a neurobiologist/psychologist working in a related field, and you can get someone else to pay for it.