I won the Angus MacDonald Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching! Many thanks to the MIT community and my 2008 Sensation and Perception class for the nomination. See the press release and other award-winners at the MIT news office.
This week-long course will introduce you to the basics of the MATLAB user interface and programming language. Through instructor presentations and daily problem sets you will learn about MATLAB syntax, general programming concepts such as functions, loops, and conditional statements, and how to analyze and visualize data in MATLAB. By no means is this class comprehensive; however, we do hope that you will build skills and confidence with the program enough to learn more on your own as necessary for other classes at MIT or for lab work as a UROP.
How senses work and how physical stimuli get transformed into signals in the nervous system. Examines how the brain uses those signals to determine what’s out there in the world. All the senses are discussed with emphasis on vision. Topics include perception of color, motion, form, and depth. Graduate students are expected to complete additional work.
Beneath the extensive data and matrix tools in Matlab lies a comprehensive programming environment largely untapped by the casual user. For those who want to do more than analyze simple data sets, this class will explore how universal programming concepts apply to Matlab and how to exploit them to build powerful tools – whether you simply want a deeper understanding of how Matlab works or you want to build a sophisticated application for experimental control. Special topics to include object-oriented programming, application development, multi-threading, parallel and distributed applications, performance optimization, and Java integration. This course presupposes basic working knowledge of Matlab or sufficient experience in another programming language to ease the transition.
Evolution of behavior, the driver of nervous system evolution, is reviewed emphasizing concepts developed in ethology and sociobiology. Examines foraging and feeding, defensive and aggressive behavior, courtship and reproduction, migration and navigation, and various social activities and communication. Students consider the contributions of inherited patterns and cognitive abilities as well as the roles of various types of plasticity. Both field and laboratory studies are reviewed; human behavior is considered in the context of primate studies.