The course will take into account the neurophysiological and psychophysical properties of all sensory systems humans are provided with. In particular the course will focus on visual perception in terms of sensitivity to localize in space and time the stimuli in the external world.
Sensazione e percezione (Wolfe J., Kluender K., Levi D. Zanichelli 2007)
Learning Objectives
The main goal of the course is to make students aware of state of the art studies about perception and to understand the anatomical and functional differences amongst sensory systems.
Prerequisites
none
Teaching Methods
Explanations of the contents of the Sensation and Perception text book with integrations of the most recent finding on the neuroscience research field about human's perception.
Further information
none
Type of Assessment
written and oral exam
Course program
This course will serve as an introduction to the process of perception amongst all sensory modalities. This course will offer both the physiological and the psychophysical approach to understand human perception and will relate the two fields together to create a consistent and complete understanding of the acts of perceiving the external world. For the physiological approach, the course will introduce the areas of lower level processing and focus on properties of the sensory receptors trasducing incoming signals to neuronal spikes. Subsequently the course will focus on the study of higher level processing area concerning their location in brain, the neural connections they have with the receptors in the periphery and in particular their functional properties. In the psychophysical approach, the course will introduce the different psychophysical properties of each single sensory modality in terms of objective estimation of their spatial and temporal resolution.