Handout for one of the laboratory exercises. Here is the handout that provides background information for one of the course's laboratories, a study of memory for faces.
Psychophysical measurement of heat. Short web piece on psychophysical measurement of a complex perceptual attribute --the hotness of chili peppers
The three .pdf files available below were prepared for the sound and hearing section of the course's restricted-access WebCT site. The entire WebCT site contains ~70 such items, covering various aspects of sensory processes. The brief link-embedding descriptions given below were taken from the WebCT site.
Those music files you downloaded. Napster. Morpheus. And others, more recent. All of these services depend upon a combination of principles of signal processing and perception.
It's not WHO'S speaking; it's WHERE the speech is spoken. Have you ever found that you could not understand what some professor was saying in class? Maybe it wasn't because the class met so darn early in the morning that you weren't really awake yet. Maybe it's because the instructor mumbled. Or, maybe it's something less obvious, the classroom! When lecture halls or classrooms are constructed, architects may not give proper thought to the room's acoustics --how its physical characteristics might affect the intelligibilty of the words that will be uttered therein. Here is a short introduction to architectural acoustics. As you read it, consider its implications for class/lecture rooms at Brandeis. Which lecture/clasrooms at Brandeis have the poorest acoustics --are hardest to "hear" in? Please drop me an e-mail, nominating the two or three lecture/classrooms in which you think it is most difficult --ignore the naure of the material presented in that room, consider only the room's acoustics. After you read the piece on architectural acoustics, who knows, you might even have a solution for the rooms' problems. I'd be interested to hear them.
What's a human body worth? People have answered this question in myriad ways. For example, you could ask about the value of gold whose weight equals the weight of a human body? Or, or you could calculate the market value of the various elements that make up the human body. An assistant professor at Harvard came up with a novel alternative, which turned out to save his university cash and embarrassment.