Hands-on Vision Demos

This is the main collection of hands-on demos that I've incorporated into my Sensation & Perception class at NDSU. Most of these are meant to take up 30-45 minutes of class time including material assembly and discussion of the key observations. A few are much shorter, but could be easily built into a longer class session or combined with other demos.

Each set of instructions below is self-contained and includes links to images you may wish to use and unaffiliated vendor sites where you can buy some of the materials you will need for the exercises. These links are not necessarily the cheapest or best version of these materials, but they are what I've used to implement these demos. Enjoy, and please be in touch with any questions or comments!

Geometric Optics - Using light sources, mirrors, and lenses to observe how light interacts with materials.

Image Formation - Observing how images are formed in the eye.

The Retina - Structure and function of the retina.

Spatial Vision - Pattern vision in early stages of visual processing

Gestalt Theory - Principles and properties of perceptual organization

Color and Luminance in Cortex - Dissociating raw intensity measurements from perceived reflectance

Binocular Vision - Seeing depth with two eyes.

Motion Perception - Perceiving changing appearance over time

Monocular Depth Cues - Inferring depth from the information in one image

Face and Object Recognition - How we perceive, discriminate, and categorize complex objects