Counts as:

• EE Elective - Special Content
• CMPE Selective - Special Content

Normally Offered:

Each Fall

Campus/Online:

On-campus only

Requisites:

Must be enrolled as a junior, senior or graduate classification.

Catalog Description:

Psychophysics is the quantitative study of the relationship between a physical stimulus and perception. This course focuses on the theory and practice of assessing human performance in terms of detection, discrimination, reconstruction and identification of physical events. Furthermore, it discusses mathematical and computational modeling of the underlying psychological mechanisms. Course material is presented in the context of visual, auditory, and haptic human-machine interfaces. The laboratory component of the course enables the students to practice designing, implementing and conducting psychophysical experiments.

Learning Outcomes

A student who successfully fulfills the course requirements will have demonstrated:

• Identify a psychophysical problem, and formulate the problem as a detection, discrimination, reconstruction or identification experiment
• Select an appropriate experimental paradigm
• Determine the range of physical parameters that are meaningful for the specific problem, and determine the experimental parameters such as number of subjects and total trials with consideration for the statistical robustness of experimental data
• Analyze experimental data in terms of threshold or information, and form mathematical models

Lecture Outline:

Assessment Method:

none