Understanding and Designing Perceptual Experiments

Abstract

Humans and computer both have limited resources with which they must process the massive amount of information present in the natural world. For over 150 years, physiologists and psychologists have been performing experiments to elucidate what information humans and animals can detect as well as how they extract, represent and process that information. Recently, there has been an increasing trend of computer scientists performing similar experiments, although often with quite different goals. This tutorial will provide a basic background on the design and execution of perceptual experiments for the practicing computer scientist.