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Perception

Course leader: Philip Fine
philip.fine@buckingham.ac.uk
One term (15 units)

This is taken at the start of the second year and follows on from the Cognition course. It covers how we take in information about the external world through our senses and interpret it to give us a meaningful understanding of the world, concentrating mainly on vision and hearing.

On completion of this course students will have a knowledge of how the sense organs and brain process information about the world. Students will also have the experience of carrying out and writing up a practical experiment.

It contains the following topic areas:

• Introduction to perception and psychophysics
• Perceptual theories - Gibson, Gregory, Marr - and perceptual illusions
• Vision - eye and brain
• Vision - colour and depth perception; object and face recognition
• Hearing - ear and brain; pitch processing; sound localisation
• Perception of time
• Clinical aspects of perception - deafness and blindness
• Touch, taste and smell perception

This course is assessed by both course work (40%) and written examination (60%).

Main texts:

• Goldstein, E.B. Sensation and perception (7th ed., Wadsworth, 2006). ISBN: 0-534-55810-0.
• Coren, S., L.M. Ward & J.T. Enns. Sensation and perception (6th ed., Hoboken: Wiley, 2004). ISBN: 0-471-45147-9.