This course will provide students with an introduction to the study of sensation and perception.

The UT course schedule contains a concise description: Theory and research in the ways we extract information from the environment. As a definition of the study of perception, I'm not sure I could improve on this.

Course material will be divided between "lower-level" sensory psychology and "higher-level" perceptual processes. Most of the course will be concerned with human behavioral (psychophysical) experiments, but as much of our knowledge of sensory systems derives from physiological experiments, results from these experiments and their interpretation will be discussed as well.

The course content differs substantially from concepts that the word "perception" conjures up in many peoples' minds. We have learned much more about the human mind and brain by asking questions like "How does the eyeball work?" than from asking questions like "How do some people always seem to know how others feel, while some other people are just clueless?" These inquiries both address our ability to extract information from our surroundings, but one question is currently tractable, while the other is not. This course concerns questions like the former.

In the gamut of psychology courses, Perception is very close to Physiological Psychology and Psychobiology with a dash of PSY 418 (i.e., mathematical concepts) tossed in.

At least half of the course concerns vision. This is not due to personal bias on my part, but due to the fact that most of our body of knowledge about perception has come from the study of vision. The proportion of the course devoted to each sensory modality roughly reflects the proportion of sensory scientists doing research on that modality. Of course, I do study visual perception ...