This course fulfills the Psychology Major Research Experience requirement. This course will cover the areas of sensation and perception, learning and motivation, physiological, comparative, cognitive, social processes, developmental, individual differences, and personality. Additional focus will be on abnormal psychology. It seems so natural and effortless to sense and perceive objects and events in our environment that we tend to take sensation and perception for granted.
Many perceptual illusions provide compelling evidence for the complexity of perceptual organization.
This course will cover vision, audition, smell and taste, as well as touch and pain and even the perception of time. By looking at specific phenomena in all of those modalities we will be able to describe many general mechanisms and phenomena that are common to all senses. Students will be introduced to methods used in psychology, neuroscience, biology and artificial intelligence. In this course we will address these and other heady questions in human cognition. Topics of special interest to the students may also be included.