Homework

From CNS120

There will be five take-home question sets, worth a total of 40% of the final grade. The fifth one will require each student to carry out a simple psychophysical experiment on "bistable perception" and to report on it. The remaining question sets focus on various aspects of monkey and human neuroanatomy and on memory. Every student is expected to hand in his/her own answers. We do not want to find identical texts.

MATLAB

Some of the homeworks require a moderate amount of programming in MATLAB. A MATLAB tutorial will be given for those who have never used it before (announcement on the class mailinglist and in class). Furthermore, a MATLAB introduction is available here. The script of the tutorial is available here.

Policy

All homeworks are due by the beginning of class (10:00 am) on their due date. Homeworks should be turned in in class or to "Spot 1" (box in front of the mailboxes outside Prof. Koch's laboratory on the 2nd floor of Beckman Behavioral Biology).

Each student is allowed 5 free late days for the entire term, to be used in any combination on the five homeworks. Weekend days count as late days. If your homework is due on Friday and you turn it in on Saturday, that's 1 late day. If you turn it in on Monday, that's 3 late days. Homeworks that are late beyond the 5 free late days will be assessed a linear 20% penalty per 24-hour period (i.e., after 1 day, your maximum grade is 80%, after 2 days it's 60%, etc).

We expect you to use a wordprocessor for your homework. Points will be deducted for illegible writing.

Two students can collaborate on any homework, but every student is expected to hand in his/her own answers. We do not want to find identical texts nor identical plots. Moreover, you must acquire your own data for the psychophysical experiments (that is, you need to record the performance of your visual system).

Please address questions regarding the homework sets directly to the primary TA, who is indicated below for each set.

#	Homework	% final grade	Date assigned	Date due	Primary TA
1.	On neuroanatomy, part 1 (pdf)	6%	4/1/09	4/10/09	Julien
2.	On cortical maps and Enabling factors (pdf) Download these 5 files: For the problem 2.1 (pdf) Horton & Hoyt 91 (pdf) matlab code (m-file) sample jpeg For the enabling factor and consciousness (bloom.pdf) You don't need to download the following: David Hockney's picture Photograph corresponding to the picture	6%	4/10/09	4/22/09	Xiaodi
3.	On neuroanatomy, part 2 (pdf)	6%	4/27/09	5/6/09	Julien
4.	Neuronal Coding (pdf) You will need these two datafiles: N1.mat N2.mat	10%	5/6/09	5/15/09	Xiaodi
5.	On bistable perception (pdf) The code you will need Blake and Logothetis 2002 review	12%	5/15/09	5/27/09	Julien TURN IN ELECTRONICALLY jdubois at klab dot caltech dot edu