Embedded Files
The following is a collection of outside resources I frequently use in my Sensation & Perception class at NDSU. First, you'll find several links to some digital materials that I often incorporate into class to complement the hands-on analog demos described here. Second, you'll see a selection of research articles that I've found some combination of fun or useful in terms of thinking about analog materials and their role in vision science.
Did I miss something? Please get in touch if you have a suggestion for something I should include here!
Links to online resources for Vision Science instruction
https://michaelbach.de/ot/ - Dr. Michael Bach's Visual Illusion page. Well over a hundred digital implementations of different illusions with easy controls for changing stimulus parameters.
http://illusionoftheyear.com/ - The Neural Correlate Society's "Best Illusion of the Year" competition. There are new illusions each year, including some striking re-imaginings of known effects.
https://www.pakin.org/~scott/stereograms/ - Stereogram experiments by Scott Pakin. This is a wonderfully creative collection of experimental stereograms that incorporate a number of elegant and surprising effects including emergent illumination and binocular hue cancellation.
http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/histogram_compression-ECVP2021-ShowTime.html - Akiyoshi Kitaoka's JavaScript tool for creating color illusions via histogram compression. Make your own "no red pixels" images!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw6nBWo21Zk - Hubel and Wiesel's videos of simple, complex, and hypercomplex cells. Hard to beat these for illustrating visual receptive field properties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIevCFZixIg - An LGN On-center cell. Another good demonstration of receptive field properties.
https://www.boredpanda.com/animal-camouflage-39/ - Examples of animal camouflage. Just a fun collection of different animals blending into their surroundings. This is usually a good way to motivate discussions of texture and material perception, or perceptual organization.
http://www.papercraftsquare.com/tag/impossible-object - Paper models of impossible objects. These can be a fun complement to lectures about object recognition, especially in the context of non-accidental properties.
http://brain.danbirman.com/ - A nice interactive demo that simulates recording from multiple visual areas while simple stimuli are presented across the visual field.
http://vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckImage.php - A color-blindness simulator that can be applied to images or websites.
https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/ - Another color-blindness simulator.
https://colormax.org/color-blind-test/ - Quick Ishihara plate test - not the full set, but useful to illustrate the basic idea.
https://www.crumplab.com/cognition/textbook/ - Matt Crump's "Instances of Cognition" open textbook, with slides, etc. for teachers.
https://www.biomotionlab.ca/demos/ - Biological Motion demos from Dr. Niko Troje's lab at York University.
https://libguides.princeton.edu/facedatabases - A face database library hosted by the Princeton Libraries. Lots of dbs that could be useful for student projects or building your own short experiments.
https://generated.photos/face-generator - a face generator for making realistic face images. Could be useful for student explorations of face space.
http://bigwww.epfl.ch/demo/ip/demos/FFT-filtering/ - This is a nice widget for playing with bandpass spatial frequency filtering.
https://samstrongvision.com/visual-fields-activity/ - Excellent activity from Dr. Sam Strong about the relationship between the eyes, the visual fields, and cortical visual processing.
https://www.djmannion.net/img_freq_web - Image explorer for visualizing the frequency domain (courtesy of Damien Mannion).
https://webutils.psy.unsw.edu.au/psyc2071_2020/neural/neural_sim/neural_sim.html) - Simulation tool for examining neural responses in early vision (courtesy of Damien Mannion)
https://webutils.psy.unsw.edu.au/psyc2071_2020/colour/scene/colour.html - Colour vision conceptual overview (courtesy of Damien Mannion).
https://webutils.psy.unsw.edu.au/psyc2071_2020/measuring_perception/measuring_perception/ - Motion and Signal Detection Theory tutorial (courtesy of Damien Mannion).
https://webutils.psy.unsw.edu.au/psyc2071_2020/neural/brightness_task/brightness_task.html - Brightness illusion task and psychometric function fitting (courtesy of Damien Mannion).
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aharley/vis/conv/ - More fun with convolutional neural networks: This widget allows you to draw your own numeral to see how different layers of a CNN respond and categorize your writing.
https://mark-kramer.github.io/Case-Studies-Python/01.html - A fantastic (and free) virtual textbook for learning to use Python by analyzing neural data in Jupyter notebooks. Not vision science specifically, but too useful to not post here!
https://kidsphysics.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/dice.pdf - A nice depth and motion illusion from Rob Ives.
Articles for S&P students (and instructors)
A number of these are behind paywalls (which I regret), but these are all papers that either include some fun aspect of vision science that I think undergraduate students will appreciate or highlight interesting analog effects that are easy to use as a starting point for your own project development.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159121001258 - "If I fits I sits: A citizen science investigation into illusory contour susceptibility in domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus)" - This is a lovely paper about using citizen science and simple analog tools to examine illusory contour perception in cats.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/p281115 - "Fooling the eyes: Trompe L'Oeil and Reverse Perspective" - Nicholas Wade and Patrick Hughes discuss "reverspective" stimuli in this paper and provide an easily constructed paper template so you can make your own.
https://www.osapublishing.org/opn/abstract.cfm?uri=opn-2-5-58 - "The blue arcs: an electrifying visual phenomenon." - An accessible description of how to see Purkinje's blue arcs and why they appear.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10454935/ - "Close encounters - an artist shows that size affects shape." - A short commentary on the visual properties of artist Chuck Close's portraits.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12075887/ - "Naive optics: understanding the geometry of mirror reflections" - I ask my students to learn how to use the Law of Reflection to calculate where light will go after bouncing off of a mirror, but even so they often have some erroneous folk beliefs about how this works. This paper is a nice examination of some of the relevant issues.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12094435/ - "Fundamentally misunderstanding visual perception: Adults' belief in visual emissions." - An interesting study of adults' folk belief that something exits the eye to make vision possible.
https://jake.vision/blog/motion-illusions - "Motion Illusions" - From Jacob Yates, an excellent primer about visual motion processing with an exceptionally clear analysis of a class of motion illusions that were making the social media rounds in 2020-2021.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1068/p5042?journalCode=peca - "A ping-pong ball camera obscura." - You can make a pinhole camera out of all kinds of things, but it turns out that ping-pong balls are one of the more convenient.
Neuropsychology video links!
I use lots of patient videos and related resources to give my Neuropsychology students examples of various consequences of brain injury. This doc has most of my favorites, and I'll be adding to this as I find (or in some cases re-discover) good stuff.
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