Course title:
Psychophysical Methods

Exam & Grading
Written exam, graded; length: 90 min

Objective
The Vision Sciences are an interdisciplinary field, with researchers having diverse backgrounds from psychology, biology, or medicine to physics, computer science and engineering. Analysing and designing experiments in the Vision Sciences thus requires knowledge straddling the typical boundaries of many disciplines. In this course we will cover some physics (light), electrical engineering (display devices), mathematical psychology (signal detection theory) and statistics (psychometric function estimation) in sufficient detail, to allow the students to both analyse and critically assess psychophysical experiments in the literature, as well as to design their own psychophysical experiments.

Learning targets
Participants will acquire the necessary knowledge to critically assess experiments in the vision sciences as well as the necessary skills to design and analyse their own behavioural (psychophysical) experiments. Through homework assignments and computer exercises they will gain hands-on experience applying signal detection theory and psychometric function estimation to data, and avoid common pitfalls.

Allowable for

• Kognitionswissenschaft - Master, Studienbereich Wahlpflcihtmodule Natürliche Kognition
• Informatik - Master
• Bioinformatik - Master
• Medieninformatik - Master
• Medizininformatik - Master
• GTC - Master, Neural Information Processing
• GTC - Master, Neural and Behavioural Sciences

Prerequisites  Basic knowledge in mathematics and statistics is required; basic knowledge of the fundamentals of visual perception is helpful.

Course Co-ordinator  Prof. Felix Wichmann, DPhil

Suggested reading  Literature will be announced at the beginning of the lecture course and seminar series.