Sensation and Perception Experiments
January 4, 2010
This fall, I took a psych class, Sensation and Perception, with Brett Fajen. The class focused on how our perceptions of the world (primarily through the vision system) are formed and altered. One part of the course involved designing and conducting experiments to measure the abilities and find the limits of human perception.
I designed two of these experiments using HTML5 canvases and JavaScript. I’ve modified them slightly to work on the web (as opposed to locally on my laptop), and so that they display the experiment results to the test subject (instead of storing the data).
Both experiments measure how well people count and identify certain objects under varying conditions. The first experiment constrains subjects to only a glance at scene, while the second experiment has subjects count objects in a fast moving stream.
Objects in experiment 2 are in a fast moving stream.
I’ve updated The Labs with a link to the main experiment page.