Perceptual Systems

How do we know what’s out in the world? Indeed, how do we know anything at all? Sensing the world around us and turning that into a reliable representation that can guide behaviour and knowledge is fundamental to everything we do. The acts of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ seem effortless and instantaneous, yet perception poses enormous challenges and is probably the most complex problem the brain must solve. In this course, you will learn how we see colour and movement, how we perceive surfaces and know materials, and how a robust perception must combine other senses such as sound, vision and touch, or taste and smell? You will also learn about the limits of perception, and surprisingly, how much it uses guesswork, prediction and filling-in to compensate. This unit draws on multiple perspectives (behaviour, neurophysiology, modelling, neuroimaging) to answer these questions and deepen your understanding of perception. The lecturers are all research-active leaders in the field and present the latest work on these research topics. Students will gain conceptual tools for evaluating the empirical and theoretical worth of recent research in perception and the tutorial component will involve working in small groups to formulate a hypothesis and develop a simple experiment to test it by collecting and analysing data. Students thus gain practical research experience that gives them valuable insight into the scientific process as it exists both in professional work and in empirical research project for Honours.