Watch and learn! Carefully selected media links will help bring key concepts and theories to life, preparing you for your studies and exams. 

Click on the following links which will open in a new window.

Video Links

• Face Blindness: Oliver Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye”
  An interview with Oliver Sacks concerning prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces.

• Visual Agnosia.
  The story of Kevin, who became unable to recognize faces after a brain injury. The interview features a nice discussion of how Kevin copes with visual agnosia.

• Eye-Popping Sidewalk Paintings
  A collection of amazing three-dimensional sidewalk paintings by Julian Beaver.

Audio Links

• Enter an Optical Illusion.
  Science Friday talks to cognitive scientist Michael Landy about optical illusions, and particularly about what happens to our perceptions in artist Julian Hoeber’s “Demon Hill” exhibit in New York City. The exhibit is modeled after the “gravitational mystery spot” roadside attraction in which water appears to run uphill.

• Curveballs: When What You See Isn’t What You Get
  Is the curveball in baseball really just an optical illusion? This All Things Considered piece addresses the question with new research on visual perception. The home page contains an amazing interactive graphic that demonstrates the illusion.

• Oliver Sacks Discusses Vision and “The Mind’s Eye”
  A Talk of the Nation interview with neurologist Oliver Sacks, about what visual disorders reveal about how the brain processes visual stimuli.

Web Resources

• Illusions

  • Sensation and Perception Tutorials
    Many of these tutorials from John Krantz at Hanover College are probably more appropriate to a course in Sensation and Perception rather than to a course in Cognition. However, the section on “Use of Visual Information in Art” contains some useful illustrations, particularly on figure-ground perception.
    Follow-up exercise: Ask students to find their own examples of figure-ground perception in art after completing the tutorial.