Psychophysics

Psychophysics

Psychophysics: A Practical Introduction, Second Edition, is the primary scientific tool for understanding how the physical world of colors, sounds, odors, movements, and shapes translates into the sensory world of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell; in other words, how matter translates into mind. This timely revision provides a unique introduction to the techniques for researching and understanding how the brain translates the external physical world to the internal world of sensation. The revision expands and refines coverage of the basic tools of psychophysics research and better integrates the theory with the supporting software. The new edition continues to be the only book to combine, in a single volume, the principles underlying the science of psychophysical measurement and the practical tools necessary to analyze data from psychophysical experiments. The book, written in a tutorial style, will appeal to new researchers as well as to seasoned veterans. This introduction to psychophysics research methods will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers within sensory neuroscience, vision research, behavioral neuroscience, and the cognitive sciences. - Presents a large variety of analytical methods explained for the non-expert - Provides a novel classification scheme for psychophysics experiments - Disseminates the pros and cons of different psychophysical procedures - Contains practical tips for designing psychophysical experiments

Psychophysics

Psychophysics

This third edition of a classic text which was first published in 1976 is the only comprehensive, up-to-date presentation of psychophysics currently available. It has been used by undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars throughout the world and is consistently thought of as the best single source for learning the basic principles of psychophysics. The coverage of the field is comprehensive, including topics ranging from the classical methods of threshold measurement, to the modern methods of detection theory, to psychophysical scaling of sensation magnitude. The approach is one in which methods, theories, and applications are described for each experimental procedure. New features found in this third edition include: * methodological and theoretical contributions made in the field during this time period, * descriptions of adaptive procedures for measuring thresholds, context effects in scaling, theory of quantal fluctuations, multidimensional scaling, nonmetric scaling of sensory differences, and the relationship between the size of the DL and the slope of the sensation magnitude function, * new methods for measuring the observer's sensitivity of criterion and an expanded discussion of category scaling including the range frequency model and verbally labeled categories, and * methods used to control the observer's nonlinear use of numbers in magnitude estimation such as line-length scaling, magnitude matching, master scaling, and category-ratio scaling.