Course Description
This course studies how the senses work and how physical stimuli are transformed into signals in the nervous system. It examines how the brain uses those signals to make inferences about the world and uses illusions and demonstrations to gain insight into those inferences, emphasizing audition and vision, with some …
This course studies how the senses work and how physical stimuli are transformed into signals in the nervous system. It examines how the brain uses those signals to make inferences about the world and uses illusions and demonstrations to gain insight into those inferences, emphasizing audition and vision, with some discussion of touch, taste, and smell. Experience with psychophysical methods is provided.
Course Info
Instructor
Departments
Learning Resource Types
assignment
Laboratory Assignments
theaters
Lecture Videos
assignment
Problem Sets
auto_stories
Readings
grading
Supplemental Exam Materials
Perception is the brain’s process of interpreting sensory information. For instance, sounds are generated by physical events in the world around us. When we listen to such sounds, what we perceive is an estimate of their physical causes. (Fig. 5 from McDermott, Agarwal, and Traer, “Physics, Ecological Acoustics and the Auditory System,” Current Biology 34, no. 20 (2024). Courtesy of Elsevier, Inc., https://www.sciencedirect.com. Used with permission.)
