Perception (V89.0022): Syllabus

Professor David Heeger

Fall, 2006
Mon & Wed, 2-3:15 
19 West 4th Street, Room 101

My contact information and office hours are posted on Blackboard.

Course Objectives

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 measuring brain activity in the human brain, using magnetic resonance imaging methods. Finally, I work on applications of my research. 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. For example, more than twenty faculty in Computer Science, Mathematics, Psychology, and Neural Science study biological and computational vision and visual cognition. Together, the four departments offer several core courses about vision and visual neuroscience every semester. Three active seminar series bring leading researchers from around the world to talk about their research on vision, and a lively journal club reads and critically discusses recent papers. For more information, see the vision@nyu web page. There are also several faculty in Neural Science who study hearing. 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 science 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 might pursue. For example, the perceptual problem of eyewitness accounts of crimes is of interest to the legal community. The physiology of animal sensory systems is of interest to the medical community.

Grading

There will be two in-class midterms and a final exam. The final will cover material from throughout the semester. The dates for the exams are listed below. The lower of the two midterm grades will be dropped. Your grade will depend 50% on the midterm (the higher of the two midterm scores), and 50% on the final exam. Extra credit for one additional hour of research participation will boost your final total score by 1/2%.

The exams will cover material from the lectures that is not necessarily in the book, as well as material from the book that is not covered in the lectures. The on-line lecture notes are the best place to start when studying for the midterms and final.

Recitation sections

Your teaching assistants are Holly Gerhard and Jennifer Corbett. Their contact information and office hours are posted on Blackboard. Their recitation sections (day, time, and location) are also posted on Blackboard.

Study questions will be posted by noon on Friday each week. Please prepare answers to these questions (not to be handed in) so that you are ready to discuss them during section.

Research participation requirement

This course includes a research participation requirement. You are required either to participate in two hours of experiments. Or, alternatively, you can choose to write a critique of some research papers on Perception. Should you choose this alternative, please make an appointment to see me as soon as possible to discuss it and pick a topic area. If you have not completed the requirement by the end of the semester, it is departmental policy that you will be assigned an incomplete until you have completed the requirement in the following semester, at which time your incomplete will be changed to their letter grade without incurring any penalty. Detailed information is provided on the Psychology Department web site (http://www.psych.nyu.edu/research/required.html) where you will find the following documents:

• Lab Choice for Advanced Students – please complete this form and return it to one of the TAs
• Student Guide for Advanced Students
• Parental Permission Forms – for students under 18 years of age
• Student Participation Form – to be taken to experiments and signed by the experimenter
• Experimetrix Instructions

Readings

Text Book:

Lecture Notes:

Other Reading:

• Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Macmillan.
• Dubin & Somparrac, How the Brain Works, Blackwell.
• 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.

Rules of the Class

• There will be no make-up exams and no early exams. If you have to miss one of the midterms, that's fine because I will drop the lowest of the two midterm scores. Check the schedule for the final exam and make your travel plans accordingly.
• 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 hard-nosed, 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.

• The TAs and I have set up schedule of weekly office hours for the entire semester. Please come see us regularly throughout the semester. 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.
• My office hours work like this: There is a sign-up sheet outside my door with 15 minute blocks of time. Usually 15 minutes is the amount of time students need. When you want to meet with me, simply write your name on the sheet and block out as many 15 minute segments as you need. You can take your chances and just stop by, but know that the people who signed up will be given priority. If nobody is signed up, I may be out of my office for short periods of time, e.g., working with graduate students down the hall, but I'll check back every 15 minutes or less. So if you come by and I'm not here, just hang out for a few minutes.
• I am also available by appointment. If you cannot make it to my regularly scheduled office hours then send me email, listing several possible days/times, to set up an appointment. I check my email regularly. Please do not call me to set up an appointment.
• Please respect my office hours. I'd be more than happy to meet with each and every one of you at some point during the semester, whether you need help or not. I assure you in all sincerity that one of my primary commitments is teaching you, but in order to do that effectively I need your cooperation. Please come to see me only during my scheduled office hours or by appointment. Realize that even though your request seems small and only takes a couple minutes, there are over a hundred of you.
• Please do not call me at home under any circumstances - I have precious little time with my family.
• Please do not send email except to schedule an appointment.
• Please respect the teaching assistant's office hours as well. They too will be there 100% for you during their scheduled office hours, but they too have numerous other responsibilities. Please do not call or send email to the TAs except to schedule an appointment. Please do not submit grade requests by email or by phone (see above for how to submit a regrade request).

• Please read the book and come to the lectures! It is a very good textbook, and I try to make the lectures entertaining 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 textbook 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.

• Check the course web pages on Blackboard (http://classes.nyu.edu/) regularly for announcements, information about exams and review sessions, grades, and changes to the schedule. You are responsible for finding out about this information.

Course Schedule

Copyright © 2006, Department of Psychology, New York University

David Heeger