The course provides theoretical foundations to understand perceptual and cognitive processes as well as methodological know-how to concretely investigate them. The mechanisms sustaining perception and cognition will be interpreted as stages within an information-processing pipeline. In this respect, the course will explain empirical phenomena observed in psychophysics and cognitive sciences research, in the context of computational models of cognition. The course will endow students with analytical tools to interpret behavioural measures and their limits, as well as reflect upon the inherently probabilistic nature of behaviour and decision-making. These concepts and tools will be presented in the context of healthy younger and older adults.  Students will be encouraged throughout to develop critical thinking skills such that they can judge and effectively compare current models of information processing using psychophysical evidence in signal detection, recognition theory and more broadly evidence in the cognitive domains of perception, attention, and memory