51³ÉÈËÁÔÆæ

Course Description

Summary

How do animals extract information that is critical for survival from an often complex and ambiguous world? When an octopus sees a crab, what features and behaviors of that crab are capturing the octopus attention? How can we investigate sensory percepts in animals that cant report those percepts to us via natural language? What are the neural correlates of perception? In this course, well cover the foundations of the science of psychophysics, which seeks to identify the relationship between the physical world and the sensory percepts informed by that world. Well explore experimental design and review psychophysical studies of perception in humans and a variety of non-human animals. Finally, we'll deploy simple psychophysical experiments in the lab to investigate certain fundamental aspects of visual perception in a large-brained marine invertebrate: the octopus.