[visionlist] Designing a course on sensation and perception

[Pawan Sinha]

Dear friends,

        I am writing to request your help with a didactic experiment.

        I shall teach an undergraduate course on sensation and perception
at MIT in the spring of 2013. Unlike in the previous years, when I have
used a textbook, I now intend to organize the course around research
papers. Of course, this approach is used often for graduate seminars. But,
it is less common for core undergraduate classes. I feel though that it is
worth a try. Using papers rather than a textbook would allow for more
flexibility in content, give undergraduates a better sense of the
excitement of research and also get them into the habit of critically
distilling information from primary sources. There are certainly some
potential limitations, such as pitching the material at too high a level.
This, perhaps, can be alleviated by getting the students to research the
older foundational articles that provide the context and motivation for the
cutting-edge research papers. Doing so has the added benefit of getting
students to approach research in a scholarly manner with a sense of
historical context and attribution.

        With this preamble, I want to begin compiling a (fairly large) set
of research papers related to diverse topics in sensation and perception.
For this I wish to request your help. Could you please send me your
suggestions for papers that you like and that satisfy the following
criteria:

1. Tackle an important problem in the broad domain of sensation and
perception
2. Have elicited (or are likely to elicit) interest/controversy in the field
3. Are relatively recent (ideally, less than a decade old)
4. Are well written

        The list of your suggestions can be as short or long as you wish.
Also, it would be very helpful if you would indicate the most relevant
articles that can serve as background reading for the primary papers. I
have deliberately not included in this message a list of the specific
topics to target in sensation and perception. For this audience, such a
list would be superfluous. Furthermore, I want to be open to topics that
might not fit the stereotypical notions of what a course on sensation and
perception should include. All I will say is that we would want the
readings to span all sensory modalities, levels of processing (signal
transduction to perceptual cognition) and approaches (psychophysics,
neurophysiology, imaging, neuropsychology and modeling).

        I shall be happy to share the compiled list with the community at
large. Thank you in advance for your suggestions.

Best regards,
-Pawan Sinha

-----------------------------
Pawan Sinha, Ph.D.
Professor of Vision and Computational Neuroscience
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
MIT
Cambridge, MA
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