PSYC 51.12 Visual Intelligence
How is our perceptual experience shaped by our memories, attention, and culture? When looking around the world, we have the impression that we perceive a true image that faithfully reproduces the physical properties of the world. However, perception is a construction of what's really out there, and our visual system constantly makes smart guesses and complex inferences about what we are likely to be perceiving.
In this course, we will learn how our own memories, attention, and cultural background influence our perception of people, objects, scenes, and emotions; what optical illusions reveal about the visual system; what and why we forget certain things but remember others; what the failures of visual attention mean in real-life contexts (e.g., mammography, or the TSA), and how experience shapes our ability to see.
Instructor
Störmer