How do we register the flow of time in natural movies?
David Whitney, Professor
Psychology
Closed. This professor is continuing with Spring 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Fall 2024.
Accurately knowing the timing of different events happening around us is a crucial ability of all human beings. In natural scenes such as movies or everyday life, dynamic events could happen either in the left or right visual field. Given that information coming through our left visual field will be processed in our right hemisphere of brain, and right visual field is processed in our left hemisphere, how could our brain be able to register the timing of events that might be happening at different halves of our vision? Our study aims to investigate this question by showing observers well-controlled dynamic movies and probe their sensitivity of discriminating the timing of different object appearance.
Role: The research apprentice will be involved in coding the experiments, running experiments and analyzing data. This mainly helps to practice the use of Matlab. In addition, students will be trained on the basic skills in psychophysics experiments, including but not limited to: color correction, parameters adjustment and deeper statistics knowledge in individual data analysis. The apprentice will also meet with the supervisor weekly to discuss background literature and preliminary data, in addition to the opportunity to attend weekly lab meetings.
Qualifications: 1. Required: High motivation, effective communication and problem-solving skills
2. Desirable but not essential: Experienced in Python or Matlab; Experience in movie editing; Basic knowledge about human perception from class C126.
Hours: 6-8 hrs
Related website: https://whitneylab.berkeley.edu/index.html
Social Sciences Digital Humanities and Data Science Education, Cognition & Psychology