Lewis O. Harvey, Jr.

Three hours of lecture and one three-hour laboratory meeting per week in the Spring and Fall. We study the peripheral and central mechanisms involved in the generation of perceptual experience. Special attention is given to vision and audition. Major theories in these areas are examined. Students carry out research projects in the laboratory section. Students are required to have good mathematics skills, especially in algebra and statistics.

Advanced survey of topics in sensory processing and perception. General areas include sensation and perception, signal detection theory, unidimensional and multidimensional scaling, along with history and theory.

Three hours of lecture and one hour of recitation per week. The course surveys major topics in psychology: perception, development, personality, learning and memory, and biological bases of behavior. Students participate for several hours as subjects in ongoing research.

There are a wide variety of physical phenomena that show specific characteristic behavior that results from the dynamic interaction of many individual components (e.g., earthquakes, avalanches, quasars, stock price fluctuations, fractals) under conditions in which the system is neither in a state of equilibrium nor in a state of chaos. These systems are in a state that physicist Per Bak called self-organized criticality. Recent publications by, for example, David Gilden and by Larry Ward, assert that many psychological data show these same characteristic behaviors (e.g., 1/f cognitive noise), and that studying these phenomena will lead to deep insights into the operation of psychological mechanisms (e.g., attention and memory).
The seminar has three goals:

1. To develop a deep understanding of the basic phenomena;
2. To learn the techniques of data analysis appropriate to uncovering the phenomena in psychological data;
3. To apply this analysis to specific data sets of psychological data that are of interest to each student.

Each participant in the seminar will make a presentation on a particular topic and will present the results of a “cognitive noise” analysis of an actual set of data from a psychological experiment. A paper based on the data analysis will be completed by the end of the seminar.

We will organize the seminar around Larry Ward’s recent book, which contains discussions of many areas of psychological research where these ideas may be appropriate:

Ward, L. M. (2002). Dynamical Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.