The objective of this course is to help you master the fundamental facts and concepts of perceptual psychology and sensory neuroscience. This is an interdisciplinary field of science, crossing the boundaries between psychology, biology, and engineering.
My own research is on functional brain imaging, human vision, computer vision, image processing, and computational neuroscience. I do perceptual psychology experiments and I work on theories of how people see. I also do experiments studying brain activity, using magnetic resonance imaging methods. Finally, I work on computational models of vision. For example, if we really understand how people see then we ought to be able to program a computer (using video cameras for its eyes) to see.
There are many other professors and graduate students on campus who are interested in the problems of perception. These people are scattered in several departments: in the Computer Science Department they are developing software for computer perception (computer vision and speech recognition), in the Medical School they study the biology of perception, and in the Engineering School they build systems for human use designed around our perceptual capabilities. If you should find yourself interested in some topic that matches my interests, or those of some other scientist on campus, I will be glad to introduce you and perhaps you can become involved in a research program.
I am perfectly well aware, however, that most of you will not end up doing research on perception, psychology, or neuroscience. I make an effort, therefore, to present the main concepts of perception in a way that will introduce you to how scientific research is done and to stimulate your scientific curiosity. Some of the concepts covered in this course will be useful to you in various professions that you are might pursue. For example, the perceptual problem of eyewitness accounts of crimes is of real interest to the legal community. The physiology of animal sensory systems is of real interest to the medical community. Perception is also important to people who work in engineering (displays, cameras) and in many branches of business (marketing).
