Cognitive Neuroscience: from Sensation to Perception

Volledige vakbeschrijving

The goal of this course is to understand the basic physiologic principles that underlie visual and auditory perception. The course will introduce the sensory systems that are responsible for vision and hearing in humans. Central topics include the nature of the stimulus (physical attributes such as amplitude and frequency, and perceptual attributes such as intensity and color), 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). Finally, the course will introduce psychophysical and neuroscientific methods designed for measuring perception.