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psychophysics
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psychophysics

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Psychophysics is the field of psychology which quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual processes by studying the effect on a subject's experience or behaviour of systematically varying the properties of a stimulus along one or more physical dimensions".

Research

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psychology
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Category:Psychophysics
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Psychophysics
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~19 min read

Encyclopedic overview

17 sections
Contents
  • History
  • Thresholds
  • Detection
  • Discrimination
  • Experimentation
  • Classical psychophysical methods
  • Method of limits
  • Method of constant stimuli
  • Method of adjustment
  • Adaptive psychophysical methods
  • Staircase procedures
  • Bayesian and maximum-likelihood procedures
  • Magnitude estimation
  • See also
  • Notes
  • References
  • External links

Psychophysics is the field of psychology which quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual processes by studying the effect on a subject's experience or behaviour of systematically varying the properties of a stimulus along one or more physical dimensions".

Psychophysics also refers to a general class of methods that can be applied to study a perceptual system. Modern applications rely heavily on threshold measurement, ideal observer analysis, and signal detection theory.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “psychophysics” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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