Perception (psych 30) Course Overview
Fall, 2006
Tues Thurs 1:15pm- 2:30 pm
Psychology Building (Jordan Hall, 420) room 041
Professor Brian Wandell
kalanit@psych.tanford.edu
Jordan Hall, rm 414
Office hours: F 11:00-1pm
Teaching Assistants:
Rosanna Olsen (rkolsen@psych.stanford.edu)
Jonathan Winawer (winawer@stanford.edu)
Nathan Witthoft (witthoft@stanford.edu)
Please check the course work site regularly for lecture notes, announcements about review
sessions, exams, grading, and changes in the schedule.
Course Objectives
The objective of this course is to help you master the fundamental facts and concepts of
perceptual psychology and sensory neuroscience. This is an interdisciplinary field of science,
crossing the boundaries between psychology, biology, and engineering.
My own research is on functional brain imaging, human vision, computer vision, image
processing, and computational neuroscience. I do perceptual psychology experiments and I work
on theories of how people see. I also do experiments studying brain activity, using magnetic
resonance imaging methods. Finally, I work on computational models of vision. For example, if
we really understand how people see then we ought to be able to program a computer (using
video cameras for its eyes) to see.
There are many other professors and graduate students on campus who are interested in the
problems of perception. These people are scattered in several departments: in the Computer
Science Department they are developing software for computer perception (computer vision and
speech recognition), in the Medical School they study the biology of perception, and in the
Engineering School they build systems for human use designed around our perceptual
capabilities. If you should find yourself interested in some topic that matches my interests, or
those of some other scientist on campus, I will be glad to introduce you and perhaps you can
become involved in a research program.
I am perfectly well aware, however, that most of you will not end up doing research on perception,
psychology, or neuroscience. I make an effort, therefore, to present the main concepts of
perception in a way that will introduce you to how scientific research is done and to stimulate your
scientific curiosity. Some of the concepts covered in this course will be useful to you in various
professions that you are might pursue. For example, the perceptual problem of eyewitness
accounts of crimes is of real interest to the legal community. The physiology of animal sensory
systems is of real interest to the medical community. Perception is also important to people who
work in engineering (displays, cameras) and in many branches of business (marketing).
Course Work and Grading
The grade is composed of the following components:
Homework assignments 20%
Midterm exam:
30%
Exploratorium essay
10%
Final exam
40%
Homework assignments: A homework assignment will be given most weeks. The homework will
be available through the course website. The homework will be due the following Thursday no
later than 5pm. Deadline will be strictly enforced. Assignments should be uploaded via the
coursework site. If you encounter problems with uploading the files, please contact one of the
TAs. Answers to the homework questions will be posted online after the deadline has expired.
You will receive 3.5 points for each assignment you handed in. If you handed in 6 or 7
assignments you will receive the entire 20 points.
Exams: There will be one in-class midterm and a final exam. The midterm will cover material
taught up to that point. The final exam will cover material the entire quarter.
The exams include additional material from the lectures that is not in the book, as well as material
from the book that is not covered in the lectures.
Final letter grades will be determined by a curve equal to the distribution of other classes at this
level at Stanford.
Exploratorium essay: During the last week of the quarter we will have a field trip to the SF
Exploratorium to visit the exhibit “seeing” which hosts more than 200 hundred sensory illusions.
The field trip is a great opportunity to have a hands-on experience with sensation and perception,
beyond our obvious daily encounters. At the visit pick your favorite illusion (that was not
mentioned in class). If you are uncertain, contact me or one of the TAs to approve your choice. In
your essay you will need to explain the illusion and the mechanisms underlying it. The
assignment is due on the day of the final exam.
Readings
Text Book: Sensation and Perception (7th edition), E. B. Goldstein. The textbook is available in
the Stanford Bookstore.
Other Reading:
For those of you interested in additional general reading, the following books are all very good:
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Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Macmillan.
Hoffman, Visual Intelligence, Norton.
Gregory, Eye and Brain, McGraw-Hill.
Hubel, Eye, Brain, and Vision, Freeman.
Churchland and Sejnowski, The Computational Brain, MIT Press.
Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul, MIT Press.
Bruce, Green, and Georgeson, Visual Perception, Erlbaum.
Wandell, Foundations of Vision, Sinauer.
Kuffler, Nicholls, and Martin, From Neuron to Brain, Sinauer.
Nalwa, A Guided Tour of Computer Vision, Addison-Wesley.
Gulick, et al, Hearing, Oxford U. Press.
Roederer, The Physics and Psychophysics of Music, Springer-Verlag.
Melzack, The Puzzle of Pain, Harper.
Other Courses
After taking this course you may find that you want to learn about some of this material in more
detail. Here is a partial list of related (perception and neuroscience) courses offered at Stanford.
Please consult the Stanford Bulletin for availability (not every course is offered every year) and
level (graduate / undergraduate):
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BioPsych 20 / HumBio 21 (R. Fernald), Introduction to Brain and Behavior.
Psych 45 (Wagner) Introduction to Learning and Memory.
Psych 55 (Boroditsky) Introduction to Cognition and the Brain.
Psych 120 (Wine), Cellular Neuroscience.
BioSci 150/250 (Sapolsky), Human Behavioral Biology.
Psych 202 (Witthoft, Winawer), Cognitive Neuroscience.
Psych 250 (Grill-Specctor), High Level Vision.
Psych 221 (Wandell), Applied Vision and Image Systems.
Neurobiology 206, The Nervous System.
Neurobiology 218 (Knudsen, Newsome), Neural Basis of Behavior.
Neurobiology 220 (Moore, Newsome), Central Mechanisms in Vision-Based Cognition.
Rules of the Class
Exams
 There will be no make-up exams and no early exams. Check the schedule for the final
exam and make your travel plans accordingly. If you are on a sports team that will be
traveling during one of the exam dates, you must make plans with me well in advance to
take the exam on the road.
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If you think your exam has been graded incorrectly, submit a written explanation along with
your exam to one of the teaching assistants. We will double check the grading and get
back to you. Beyond that, please don't argue about your grades. It isn't that I am so hardnosed, it's rather that I have a very strong sense of fairness and that means not caving in
to the pushiest people while the people who play by the rules suffer.
Office Hours
* The three TAs and I will each have weekly office hours. Please see the course Home Page
for the times and locations.
* The TAs and I have set up a generous schedule of office hours for the entire quarter, every
week. Please come see us regularly throughout the quarter. We will also offer a review session
before each exam. If you must cram before an exam, please don't expect us to cram with you. In
the days before an exam, we will be available at our usual office hours but not for extra time to
help you get caught up if you've fallen far behind. It would not be fair to your fellow students if you
were to monopolize us for a long period of time right before an exam.
Class and Classwork:
* Please read the book and come to the lectures! It is a very good textbook, and I try to make
the lectures fun as well as informative. You are responsible for material covered in the lectures
even if it is not in the textbook, and you are responsible for the material in the text book even if it
has not been covered in the lectures. The on-line lecture notes are the best place to start when
studying for the exams.
* Come to class on time, and don't leave before it's over. If you have another class that begins
before this one is over, that means that you have to choose between one or the other. Besides
being rude, it's disruptive to have people coming and going.
* Please PLEASE ask questions during class. I will try to stop every once in a while to make
sure that everyone is with me, but sometimes I have a tendency to move too quickly. It is your
responsibility to ask a question, if only to slow me down. Please don't worry about asking a
"stupid" question. Chances are that other students in the class are also confused. Even if it isn't
the sharpest question, I for one will not hold it against you. Just the opposite. Asking a question
shows that you're thinking. Believe me, I've asked plenty of bone-headed questions over the
years and I'm sure that there will be plenty more where those came from.