What surprises people (with student comments in quotes)

What took them by surprise in the class material:

"Wowowowow, what is a stimulus?? Gibson and that whole problem really blew my mind. I was talking about it to everyone I knew all week. Make all the joke you want, but that paper should be required reading for all psychology students. Also all students. That paper is about the danger of assumptions, really. "

"There were a lot of interesting little facts that we learned throughout the course that I wasn't really expecting, like sharing cells with your older siblings. I was not expecting to develop an opinion on the definition of the words "natural" and "organism," among other big questions we explored."

"Physics, biology, philosophy, ecology, and epistemology."

"I was not expecting to get into physics and how it relates to psychology."

“I signed up for this class with a minimal idea of what to expect. From the title of the course, I knew that we were going to talk about how we perceive our senses, but we learned so much more. We had to start the discussion with what makes a stimulus a stimulus and what it means to perceive. Recognizing a friend's face in a crowd or interpreting a scene looks simple from the outside, but there are many factors going into perception.”

“I was not expecting to learn so much about cognition and development in this class. I felt like we touched a lot on development, and how this knowledge aids our understanding of sensation and perception.”

Back to Sensation & Perception or back to In the Classroom