Studying perception
Best reason: to understand yourself
Practical reasons:
* Interface design (‘human factors’/‘ergonomics’: lighting, acoustics, cockpit design.)
* Build prosthetic devices to overcome sense organ defects (glasses, hearing aids)
* Creating ‘Virtual Realities’ (games, movies, but also artificial flavors, smells, perfumes)
* Medicine: repair broken sense organs and nervous systems, prevent defects
* Engineering: Design robots and other perceiving machines
* Advertising
What is involved in studying perception?
*Physics, to understand the stimuli impinging on our senses (e.g., light, chemicals).
*Anatomy and physiology, to understand the sense organs and the parts of the nervous system that process sensory data (e.g., the eyes and ears, and the corresponding visual and auditory areas of the brain)
*Psychology, to understand perceptual abilities. The scientific study of perceptual responses to physical stimuli is called ”Psychophysics".
* Computer science - the computer is our best analogy, or ‘model’ of the human mind.
03. Why and How do we study perception?
1:38 PM
The best reason to study perception is to understand more about the mind and the brain - in other words, more about yourself. There are also motivations from advertising, medicine, engineering....
What are the approaches to the study of perception?
* Psychological/Psychophysical (‘software’): Emphasizes behavior, abilities. Computational models.
* Biological/Anatomical (‘hardware’): Emphasizes localization. Neural models.
Which is best? Depends on the question you want to answer!
If you are interested in making brain implants to help people to see, or hear, then you had better have a good Neurological understanding of the brain. When it comes time to evaluate these implants, to see how good they are, that is, how closely they match normal human sensory abilities, you will be conducting Psychophysical experiments. In a later evaluation stage, you might want to just observe how well the individual is coping back in his/her daily life, taking a more Naturalistic approach.
