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 addition to looking at the different types of behavior, we will also investigate the different techniques used to study them, compare animal models to gain insight into human systems, and try to tell evolutionary stories that make sense of our current humanity. In this course we will address these and other heady questions in human cognition.