BCS 221: Audition
Formerly: NSC/PSY 338, Psychology of Audition
Cross-listed: NSC/PSY 221
Prerequisites: BCS 110*
Offered: Spring
About this course:
This course is for students who are interested in auditory perception and its physiological foundation. The course should be of interest as well for students interested in the receptive aspects of speech and language, and for students who wish to learn about professional careers concerned with hearing impairment and deafness. Hearing is an interesting area of neuroscience in part because of its great importance to human communication and also because researchers are very actively working to determine its physiological substrate at the ear and in the central nervous system. Thus there is a lot to talk about, ranging in level from the details of gene expression responsible for our very sensitive ability to resolve the time interval between successive acoustic events, that is necessary for perceiving spatial location for speech recognition, to studies of the cognitive functions that help us identify particular sound objects amidst acoustic noise.
There are three sections of the course. The first concerns acoustics and how the physical principles of sound waves are used by the ear prior to neural encoding. The second is the analysis of the physiology of stimulus encoding at the ear, and the neural transformations that take place at higher centers. The third, which has the most emphasis in the course, is the study of the relationship between these acoustical and physiological principles and the findings of psychoacoustics concerning loudness, pitch, spatial position, and temporal analysis, the analysis of sound objects, and hearing impairment.
* This course assumes that students have had BCS 110 or an equivalent, and so are familiar both with the basic structure and function of the nervous system and the methods for studying perceptual phenomena. The course will begin with a brief review of these fundamental topics. Students who have not taken the prerequisite but who think they might be adequately prepared for the course should consult the instructor.