Cognitive Neuroscience: from Sensation to Perception

Full course description

The goal of this course is to understand the basic physiological principles and sensory systems that underlie visual and auditory   perception. Central topics include the nature of the stimulus (physical attributes such as frequency and amplitude, and perceptual attributes such as color and intensity), the transduction process (the transformation of a physical stimulus into a neural signal leading to a subjective experience), the functional neuroanatomy of the human sensory system (the organization of sensory neurons into functional maps, columns, and pathways), and mechanisms for object perception (the organization of sensory features into meaningful percepts, for example, a face in a crowd or speaker at a loud party). In addition, the course will introduce psychophysical and neuroscientific methods designed for measuring perception.