Most people are confused about temporal resolution. That includes my students. So I created this diagram to communicate the basic concept, with the example of human visual processing, using a water-works metaphor. Why water-works? I’m trying to explain an unfamiliar concept in terms that everyone can understand intuitively.
The BBC has produced a wonderful series called Richard Hammond’s Invisible Worlds. It’s visually stunning and it’ll wow you with a lot of cool science. The first episode is called Speed Limits. Because I study speed limits on perception, I was very excited. To introduce the topic, Richard Hammond explains that vision is too slow to see many interesting things, things which can be revealed by high-speed imaging techniques.
Below is a draft of a chapter I’m writing for Subjective Time, an upcoming book from MIT Press edited by Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd. In a bowling alley, a professional player launches his ball down the lane. As the ball rolls toward the pins, our visual experience of it is smooth and seamless. The ball shifts in position continuously, and this seems to be represented with high fidelity by our brain.
programming perception experiments job opening
We live in an era where students, shift workers, and scientists increasingly consume drugs that modify brain activity in order to enhance cognition. Ethicists are right to fret about this as the number of addictive substances with some ill effects proliferates (DeJong et al. 2008). People will use these things regardless whether or not some condemn the phenomenon, so it is important that information is out there about how best to use them.
After several students requested copies, I posted two movies on youtube, one of how visual input to balance can make a baby fall when visual stimulation is perverse. The other shows how the owl’s vestibular system allows its neck to quickly counterrotate to compensate for the body’s movement. Both videos make people laugh.
I’ve transitioned to all open-source software for my science. The Python language and its libraries VisionEgg and Psychopy are more than sufficient to code my perception experiments. For data analysis, I’ve gotten pretty far with the SciPy library for Python, which has probability distributions, function minimization, Fourier transforms, etc. The Matplotlib library makes it easy to make plots in a way familiar for old MATLAB users like me.
The conventional encyclopedia: old and unimproved! Here is a preprint of my entry for the The Sage Encyclopedia of Perception with headword “The Binding Problem”. The hardcopy version of the encyclopedia will be a massive 1100-page tome with hundreds of contributors.
I’m releasing an interactive tutorial suitable for either individual learning or in the context of a class wherein each student, or pair of students, has a computer. I used it for my third-year psychology university students. Before beginning the 100-minute class, most had little idea how connectionist networks could store memories or compute visually guided action.
Free neural network simulation engines, good for understanding simple cognitive-style networks, abstracting away from the actual reality with all those pesky ion channels and membrane potentials and spikes. Emergent is a workhorse, used by serious neural networks researchers but also useful for learning, in conjunction with an associated neural nets textbook, which is probably good for advanced undergraduates.