9.35 | Spring 2024 | Undergraduate

Perception

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.

This course is supported in part by Dr. Eugene Stark, Jr. SB ‘68, SM ‘69, EE ‘70, SCD ‘72 for the 2026-2027 academic year.

Course Info

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Supplemental Exam Materials
Diagram illustrating auditory perception: three sound-generating events (fork hitting plate, chair scraping, liquid pouring) transmit through an outdoor environment to the ear, with the brain performing perceptual inference to interpret both the direct sounds and their environmental context.
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.)
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