We are at the beginning of a new section of the course. While the first section focused on the underlying basis of our behavior, the focus of this section will be on our thinking. We will start with the input to the process, sensing and perceiving the world. This of course was an issue in the last section of the course where we saw that behavior often began with a stimulus that had to be sensed (think of the knee jerk example or a taxis). The specific focus today will be on an introduction to some of the major conceptual issues that will frame our analysis of perception, psychophysics, and the auditory system.
The slides for today are here.

Specific topics include:

• The nativist-empiricist debate (does all information come in via the senses or is some innate)?
• Top-down and bottom-up perception and the issue of why we don't see the world as it is.
• The ear and audition.
• Volley and Place theories of hearing.
• Operating characteristics of the auditory system.
• Psychophysics: measuring the response of sensory systems, including absolute and difference thresholds.
• The just noticeable difference (jnd) and Weber's and Fechner's law.
• Power functions (Stevens) and its neural counterpart.