Thread by @bjbalas

A 🧵re: Week 1 of S&P at @NDSU. This time around, I'm going to tweet out more details of what I cover each week and what kinds of problems I want my students to learn how to solve. Hope this is useful and remember you can find demo ideas/etc at sites.google.com/view/hands-on-…. <1/n>

Week 1 focuses on what the class is about: What's interesting about studying vision? Why does Dr. Balas think I should use math to understand it? @NDSUPsychology students tend to have a good bit of skepticism about both propositions. <2/n>

I start by highlighting some ways that their vision does some impressive stuff. @MichaelBach99's acuity/hyperacuity is a great start for a group activity - how low can you go? I emphasize that there's measurements the visual system makes very well. michaelbach.de/ot/lum-hyperac… <3/n>

Other impressive stuff your visual can do includes RSVP tasks. You can do a lot of measuring in small amounts of space, and RSVP performance shows you can do a lot of measuring in small amounts of time, too. You can find some good versions at lab.tellab.org. <4/n>

Two more rounds of impressive abilities: The next step is point-light walkers - look how much you can see in such a sparse display! Niko Troje's lab maintains a great page of demos for this. biomotionlab.ca/demos/ <5/n>

Last but not least: The Sporcle quizzes. I personally love the one about telling Dalmatians apart from cookies-and-cream ice cream, but YMMV. But here's the fun part: Ask students how they tell the difference. sporcle.com/games/sproutcm… <6/n>

"Well, there's fur." But what does fur look like? "Um - it has lines in it." OK, here's some ice cream with lines - why isn't that a dog? It doesn't take too long to demonstrate that it's tough to pin down what the information is that they're using. <7/n>

So now onto the things that are a little weird about your VS. I like to start with the Watercolor Illusion. You were so *good* at measuring stuff accurately before, so why do you see color where there isn't any? michaelbach.de/ot/col-waterco… <8/n>

What about being good at measuring stuff well in small amounts of time? Here's the Lilac Chaser to make that weird for you - if you can hold fixation well enough, the only thing you see is the dot that isn't there. michaelbach.de/ot/col-lilacCh… <9/n>

The point isn't that your vision is bad or that these effects are just weird. Your vision does work and it must work via some steps that lead to these effects too. So our goal? Try and understand what those steps might be. <10/n>

You can plug in whatever illusions you like, too - @AkiyoshiKitaoka's Rotating Snakes is always a hit. The big goal of the first days is to establish that there is something here to be understood and we're going to try and understand it. <11/n> michaelbach.de/ot/mot-snakes/

I'll stop here for now, but the next step is talking to them about using mathematics. That's the hard part for sure, so I'll say more about how I get started later this week. As always, I'd love to hear feedback/questions about teaching S&P! <end>

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