LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Psychophysics
built 652 days ago
Psychophysics is the branch of Psychology dealing with the study of relationship between physical stimuli and individual perception. Perception is a general concept which refers to interpretation of a stimuli received by the senses. The are number of factors that affect the perception. Even the same stimuli can give different perceptions at different situations. Some of the factors that affect the perception are the individual's expectations, similarity, proximity, continuity and closure.
Source:
Psychophysics is the scientific study of relationships between physical stimuli and perceptual phenomena. For example, in the case of vision, one can quantify the influence of the physical intensity of a spot of light on its detectability, or the influence of its wavelength on its perceived hue. Examples could as well be selected from the study of AUDITION or other sensory systems.
Source:
Psychophysics is concerned with describing how an organism uses its sensory systems to detect events in its environment. This description is functional, because the processes of the sensory systems are of interest, rather than their structure (physiology). One psychophysical theory, the Theory of Signal Detectability (TSD), uses a combination of statistical decision theory and the concept of the ideal observer to model an observer's sensitivity to events in its environment. TSD is stimulus-oriented, because properties of the stimuli are used to determine the theoretically best, or ideal, observer for a given detection task. This observer may then be used to compare the performance of human, and other, observers. For instance, the ability of humans to detect simple acoustic waveforms can be modeled as a linear system consisting of a filter, rectifier, integrator, and sampler.
Source:
Psychophysics, the study of human responses to physical stimulation, was dominated first by Fechner's logarithmic law, and then by Stevens' power law. Both laws assume that changes in responses within the organism are directly proportional to changes in the level of external stimulation. While useful in certain contexts, these laws do not do justice to the full complexity of human psychophysical response; and many researchers have pointed out the need for a more sophisticated mathematical psychophysics.
Source:
From this inspiration Fechner invented 'psychophysics', a very useful study of the relationship between stimulus intensity and subjective experience (detection) of the stimulus. The techniques he invented opened the door to the scientific study of mind, combining manipulation of quantifiable, physical, stimuli with subjective reports of stimulus perception. The success of this approach influenced Wilhelm Wundt, who modified the techniques to create the first scientific study of conscious experience.
Source:
[One] important figure in psychophysics is Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand Ludwig Von Helmholtz (1821- 1894). Hermann was born in 1821 in Potsdam, near Berlin. His father was a teacher at a secondary school and encouraged his son to get a broad based education. Hermannn’s mother was a descendant of William Penn. Hermann took a liking to physics and medicine. He soon became a surgeon in the Prussian army.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Psychophysics