A course to learn to do visual psychophysics, University of Tuebingen Jan. 7-24th, 2020.

Schedule: full day, Monday through Fridaywhole day every weekday during that period

Location: Max Planck Ring 8, in the labs of department of Sensory and Sensorimotor Systems

Teaching team: Prof. Li Zhaoping (lead lecturer), Dr. Jinyou Zou, Dr. Sarah Stednitz, Dr. Jeremy Badler, and other members of Zhaoping's department.

Preparation works for the course:

(1) Oct. 24, 2019, message to students: please prepare for the course by self-learning Matlab programming. You can use this book to learn, and you can find some online courses as well.

(2) Dec. 17, 2019, message to students: please fill out forms for the on boarding process to enter the MPI for the course

Course Plan

(1) Each student has his/her own laptop on which matlab and Psychophysics toolbox are installed.

(2) Plan for the first two weeks of the course, starting Jan. 7th:

(2a) Learn the basics of visual psychophysics by going through selected exercises from this online tutorial.

(2b) Lectures on the basics of visual psychophysics research --- rules for experimental record taking, data collection, data storage, scientific conduct for research, tips for doing daily research.

(2c) Practice and extension by trying to implement a previous experiment in this paper Attention capture by eye of origin singletons even without awareness --- a hallmark of a bottom-up saliency map in the primary visual cortex. Journal of Vision, 8(5):1, 1-18, http://journalofvision.org/8/5/1/, doi:10.1167/8.5.1 This will involve: reading and understanding the paper, write matlab code to implement it, take data for one or more of the experiments in this paper.

(2d) Extensions: for students who can do 2a-c quickly, we offer more learning and practice in zebrafish visual behavior, human eye tracking, or even a mini-project which could be research-worthy, depending on the progress of individual students on the course.

(3) Plan for the third week of the course: each student analyzes data, then prepares and gives a presentation of the results from the data collected, as well as the lessons learned from the course.

Lecture notes and slides

Zhaoping's lecture 1: introduction and overall plan. click here

Zhaoping's lecture 2: Flow diagram and tips. click here

Jinyou's lectures and notes.

Sample script Demo video click here

Sample code for experiment click here

Lecture on sample code for the experiment click here

Course schedule click here

Basic PsychoToolbox about Screen click here

Useful functions in the projects click here

Interactive Learning Code click here

Jeremy's lecture: Defensive coding in MATLAB. click here .

Jeremy's lecture: Eye Tracking click here .

Jeremy's lecture: Matlab plotting click here .