Sensation & Perception (PSY 231) (with student comments in quotes)
Before you leap into the below, please consult the College Catalog to see what the course is about
The central focus of this class is the scientific study of subjective experience of common facts of stimulation. Another way to say that is "the study of how organisms respond to and interpret events around them in the service of satsifying goals in the world." There is no passive intake of information, and all living systems moving about the world actively influence what meaning they take from events in the world around them. Hence, the fact that we humans all see the world differently is the challenge for psychological science to explain, and this course grapples with how well psychological science can explain how a lawful account of perception supports an explanation for all organisms.
This course addresses the...
historical roots of current dominant theoretical viewpoints on the science of sensation and perception
computational, neuroscientific, and even computational-neuroscientific approaches to sensation and perception
how sensation and perception works with neurons
how sensation and perception works without neurons
chemoreception (smell and taste and other chemical sensitivites that humans do or don't have)
auditory perception, through the lens of popular-music production
visual perception
language perception
limitations of computational-neuroscientific approaches to sensation & perception
perceptual development--evolutionary theory supporting diversity in perceptual outcomes.
ecological and embodied theories of perception
affordances and dynamical-systems approaches
"perception-action cycles" and the inextricability of action and perception from one another
engineering and materials-science applications informed by psychological science of sensation and perception
e.g., robotics, artificial intelligence, tensegrity design, adaptive architectures
Here is a sample of what students say they learned about in this class:
"Overall, I think I learned that there's a lot more than I thought there was to sensation and perception. I never questioned how we define perception, but now I know there's an importance to questioning things like this."
"Basically, there were a lot of things that I thought I knew, but turns out they were misconceptions."
"Doing science while not forgetting why we do science and how we do it."
"How intricate and nested our perceptions and responses to perceptions are."
"For me personally, I think I finally can argue for the role of action in perception with evidence and logical thought."
"It's hard to point to one singular most important thing, so I will just ramble my major take-aways from the class. Perception, much like matters such as consciousness, is only confirmable through observed action (that is presumed consequent of sensation). This greatly expands the boundaries for what we can or cannot perceive; this framing, however, is not for that express purpose. Rather, we take this loose/soft definition of perception because we reject the 1 to 1 invariant conception of sensation to perception (e.g., in computational theory of mind), and seek to adequately account for the nonobvious ways different sense information interact, and for history/contextual priors to enable perception. This does not spiral into a complete determinism because the ways these levels constrain one another leaves room for choice/probability (not constrained to one, singular option). Moreover, this allows us to understand perception/consequent action as predictable and therefore study-able, as opposed to a stochastic mess of interactions and factors."
Click below links to see…
...what students learned about their own skills (with student comments in quotes)
...what surprised students about class material (with student comments in quotes)
...what advice they’d give to future students (with student comments in quotes)