Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour - McMaster University

Perception

Perception is one of the oldest and most fundamental disciplines within Psychology, dating back to at least the time of the ancient Greeks. The goal of perception research is to understand how stimuli from the world interact with our sensory systems, forming visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory representations of the world. Research in perception and psychophysics is directed at discovering the lawful relations between environmental events and subjective experience. This area spans a wide range of problems extending from the structure and function of the sense organs, through the processing of sensory information, to the nature of subjective experience and the methods by which an accurate description of these experiences is obtained. As such, an understanding of perception is critical for all areas within Psychology. The modern study of perception is highly integrative, combining cognitive, behavioural, computational, developmental, and neuroscientific approaches.

Cognition

McMaster's cognitive psychologists study a wide variety of problems, but are united in the goal of understanding how people mentally represent their experience and then use these representations to operate effectively. Neisser launched the "cognitive revolution" in 1966 with these words: "the world of experience is produced by the man who experiences it". This statement captures the student of cognition's belief that people are not passive organisms whose mental representations are simple or direct reflections of the outside world. Rather, they are active processors of environmental events, and as such they bring their past knowledge and their biases to bear on how they perceive and understand all current events. Thus, perceiving, imagining, thinking, remembering, forming concepts, and solving problems, indeed all aspects of people's mental lives, define the domain of cognitive exploration.

For Undergraduate Students

Undergraduate courses in this area of research are designed to provide students with an interdisciplinary view and to highlight the connections among cognition, perception and other sub-disciplines within psychology. A solid base in perception (2E03) and cognition (2H03) is followed by courses in memory (3VV3), reading (3U03), language (3UU3), audition (3A03), and cognitive neuroscience (3BN3, 4BN3). Developmental issues are also relevant, for example, cognitive development (3II3), and development during infancy (3HH3). Students may study the multisensory mind (3D03), the arts and the brain (3H03), learning and memory (3FA3), and vision (3J03). Practical laboratory skills are obtained from a relevant lab course (3EE3, 3V03, 3LL3, 3MM3). Students considering graduate school should consider completing a course with a strong research component (4QQ3, 4D06, 4DD6, 4D09). Students who graduate with a focus in this area are well prepared for graduate studies in psychology and related disciplines, professional studies such as medicine, or research positions in government, university or industry.

For Graduate Students

The research effort in Cognition and Perception at McMaster is diverse and many broad areas of interest are represented. We study vision, audition, touch, multi-sensory integration, perceptual and cognitive development, attention and spatial processing, human factors, psychophysics, music perception, perceptual illusions and after effects. We investigate the formation and use of concepts, the modeling of memory processes, human communication skills, and reading and its development. Our associates in the Psychiatry Department broaden the McMaster experience with their studies of normal and abnormal development and of neuropsychological aspects of human perception and cognition.

Cognition and Perception Faculty