This course instructs students on how to develop technologies that help people measure and communicate emotion, that respectfully read and that intelligently respond to emotion, and have internal mechanisms inspired by the useful roles emotions play.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the experiences of African American Soldiers in World War I. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

In this activity about light and perception, learners discover how a flash of light can create a lingering image called an "afterimage" on the retina of the eye. Learners will be surprised when they continue to see an image of a bright object after staring at it and looking away. Use this activity to introduce learners to principles of optics and perception as well as to explain why the full moon often appears larger when it is on the horizon than when it is overhead. This lesson guide also includes a few extensions like how to take "afterimage photographs."

Short pieces of chenille stem arranged inside a box look like a random jumble of line segments—until viewed in the proper perspective.

Note: This activity is detail oriented and time intensive. It’s done by threading a long length of fishing line through twenty small holes, and then attaching short pieces of chenille stem to create a suspended pattern. When you look through a viewing hole, that random-looking pattern resolves into the form of a chair. If you think being a watchmaker is something you’d hate, then you might want to rethink doing this Snack!

In this demonstration, amaze learners by performing simple tricks using mirrors. These tricks take advantage of how a mirror can reflect your right side so it appears to be your left side. To make the effect more dramatic, cover the mirror with a cloth, climb onto the table, straddle the mirror, and then drop the cloth as you appear to "take off." This resource contains information about how this trick was applied during the making of the movie "Star Wars."

In this optics activity, learners discover that when they rotate a special black and white pattern called a Benham's Disk, it produces the illusion of colored rings. Learners experiment with the speed of rotation and direction of rotation to observe varying patterns. Use this activity to explain to learners how our eyes detect color and how different color receptors in the eye respond at different rates.

Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Identify the general and special senses in humansDescribe three important steps in sensory perceptionExplain the concept of just-noticeable difference in sensory perception

This course is the second half of the intensive survey of brain and behavioral studies for first-year graduate students in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences curriculum. Each module of this core course involves a series of overview lectures by leading researchers in the field. By offering a thorough introduction to the current state of the discipline while emphasizing critical thinking, the course aims to prepare students as cognitive scientists.
Topics include: perception, attention, working memory, recognition and recall, language, and other issues in cognitive science. Topics are covered from the neural, behavioral and computational perspectives.

This class is the second half of an intensive survey of cognitive science for first-year graduate students. Topics include visual perception, language, memory, cognitive architecture, learning, reasoning, decision-making, and cognitive development. Topics covered are from behavioral, computational, and neural perspectives.

This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.
This survey course is intended to review memory and its impact on our lives. Memories make us who we are, and make us what we are going to become. The loss of memory in amnesia can cause us to lose ourselves.
Memory provides a bridge between past and present. Through memory, past sensations, feelings, and ideas that have dropped from conscious awareness can be subsequently recovered to guide current thought and action. In this manner, memory allows us to locate our car in the parking lot at the end of the day or guides us to avoid retelling the same joke to the same friend. This seminar will focus on how memories are created and controlled such that we are able to remember the past. Recent insights from non-human electrophysiological and human brain imaging research will be emphasized.

Explores the theory and research related to information processing, focusing on attention, perception, memory storage and information retrieval. Also highlights work in artificial intelligence and cognitive neuroscience which serves to describe and explain cognitive processes.

Everyone has their own view of the nature of consciousness based on their education and background. The intention of this book is to expand this view by providing an insight into the various ideas and beliefs on the subject as well as a review of current work in neuroscience. The neuroscientist should find the philosophical discussion interesting because this provides first-person insights into the nature of consciousness and also provides some subtle arguments about why consciousness is not a simple problem. The student of philosophy will find a useful introduction to the subject and information about neuroscience and physics that is difficult to acquire elsewhere.

In this optics/mathematics activity, learners use two hinged mirrors to create a kaleidoscope that shows multiple images of an object. Learners discover that the number of images reflected in the mirrors depends on the angle between the mirrors. Learners also observe that when they set the hinged mirrors on top of a third mirror, they create a reflector that always sends light back in the direction from which it came. Use this activity to introduce basic principles of light and optics including angle of reflection and angle of incidence.

This course uses neuroscience methods to study the cognitive development of human infants and children. Case studies draw from research on face recognition, language, executive function, representations of objects, number and theory of mind.

An in-class demonstration of perception and individual perceptual differences, using optical illusions and visuals.

In this fun optics activity, learners explore principles of light, reflection (mirrors), and perception. Learners work in pairs and sit on opposite sides of a "two-way" mirror. Both partners vary the amount light illuminating their faces. As they adjust the light, they begin to see themselves gradually assuming aspects of their partner's features, so that their image becomes a "composite" person. This activate guide includes instructions on how to build a two-way mirror.

This online exhibit is a visual illusion in which a fuzzy blue dot disappears into a green background. The illusion is created by the tiny jittering movements that your eyes are continually making. Take your investigation further by making your own hands-on fading dot illusion - instructions are at the Exploratorium Snack website (see related link).