Psychophysics

Psychophysics PDF

Author: Frederick A.A. Kingdom

Publisher: Academic Press

Published: 2016-01-04

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0080993818

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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 of Reading in Normal and Low Vision

Psychophysics of Reading in Normal and Low Vision PDF

Author: Gordon E. Legge

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2006-10-11

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1482269481

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Written by a leader in the field, this book discusses the role of vision in reading. The author describes the influence of physical properties of text on reading performance and the implications for information processing in the visual pathways. He explores different forms of low vision that affect reading, text characteristics that optimize reading for those with low vision, principles underlying the legibility of text, and guidelines for displaying text. Special topics include the role of the magnocellular pathway in reading and dyslexia, Braille reading, and fonts for highway signs. An accompanying CD contains reprints of the seminal series of articles by Gordon E. Legge and colleagues published between 1985 and 2001.

Psychophysics

Psychophysics PDF

Author: S.S. Stevens

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-29

Total Pages: 527

ISBN-13: 1351495879

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Psychophysics is a lively account by one of experimental psychology's seminal figures of his lifelong scientific quest for general laws governing human behavior. It is a landmark work that captures the fundamental themes of Stevens's experimental research and his vision of what psycho-physics and psychology are and can be. The context of this modern classic is detailed by Lawrence Marks's pungent and highly revealing introduction. The search for a general psychophysical law—a mathematical equation relating sensation to stimulus—pervades this work, first published in 1975. Stevens covers methods of measuring human psychophysical behavior: magnitude estimation, magnitude production, and cross-modality matching are used to examine sensory mechanisms, perceptual processes, and social consensus. The wisdom in this volume lies in its exposition of an approach that can apply generally to the study of human behavior

Sensation and Judgment

Sensation and Judgment PDF

Author: John C. Baird

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2014-02-25

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 1317779770

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Psychophysical theory exists in two distinct forms -- one ascribes the explanation of phenomena and empirical laws to sensory processes. Context effects arising through the use of particular methods are an unwanted nuisance whose influence must be eliminated so that one isolates the "true" sensory scale. The other considers psychophysics only in terms of cognitive variables such as the judgment strategies induced by instructions and response biases. Sensory factors play a minor role in cognitive approaches. This work admits the validity of both forms of theory by arguing that the same empirical phenomena should be conceptualized in two alternative, apparently contradictory, ways. This acceptance of opposites is necessary because some empirical phenomena are best explained in terms of sensory processes, while others are best ascribed to central causes. The complementarity theory stresses the "mutually completing" nature of two distinct models. The first assigns importance to populations of sensory neurons acting in the aggregate and is formulated to deal with sensory effects. The second assigns importance to judgment uncertainty and to the subject strategies induced by experimental procedures. This model is formulated to explain context effects. Throughout the text, the exposition is interlaced with mathematics, graphs, and computer simulations designed to reveal the complementary nature of psychophysical explanations.

Visual Psychophysics

Visual Psychophysics PDF

Author: Zhong-Lin Lu

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-10-11

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 0262019450

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A comprehensive treatment of the skills and techniques needed for visual psychophysics, from basic tools to sophisticated data analysis. Vision is one of the most active areas in biomedical research, and visual psychophysical techniques are a foundational methodology for this research enterprise. Visual psychophysics, which studies the relationship between the physical world and human behavior, is a classical field of study that has widespread applications in modern vision science. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, this textbook provides a comprehensive treatment of visual psychophysics, teaching not only basic techniques but also sophisticated data analysis methodologies and theoretical approaches. It begins with practical information about setting up a vision lab and goes on to discuss the creation, manipulation, and display of visual images; timing and integration of displays with measurements of brain activities and other relevant techniques; experimental designs; estimation of behavioral functions; and examples of psychophysics in applied and clinical settings. The book's treatment of experimental designs presents the most commonly used psychophysical paradigms, theory-driven psychophysical experiments, and the analysis of these procedures in a signal-detection theory framework. The book discusses the theoretical underpinnings of data analysis and scientific interpretation, presenting data analysis techniques that include model fitting, model comparison, and a general framework for optimized adaptive testing methods. It includes many sample programs in Matlab with functions from Psychtoolbox, a free toolbox for real-time experimental control. Once students and researchers have mastered the material in this book, they will have the skills to apply visual psychophysics to cutting-edge vision science.

Introduction to the Physics and Psychophysics of Music

Introduction to the Physics and Psychophysics of Music PDF

Author: Juan G. Roederer

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1461599814

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Viii book we shall refer a great deal to the discipline of psycho physics, which in a broad sense tries to establish in a quan titative form the causal relationship between the "physical" input from our senses and the psychological sensations and physiological reactions evoked in our mind and body, re spectively. Actually, we shall try to weave a rather close mesh between physics and psychophysics-or, more pre cisely, psychoacoustics. After all, they appear naturally interwoven in music itself: not only pitch, loudness and timbre are a product of physical and psychoacoustical proc esses, but so are the sensations related to consonance and dissonance, tonic dominance, trills and ornamentation, vibrato, phrasing, beats, tone attack, duration and decay, rhythm, and so on. Many books on physics of music or musical acoustics are readily available. An up-to-date text is the treatise of John Backus (1969). No book on psychoacoustics is available at the elementary level, though. Several review articles on pertinent topics can be found in Tobias (1970) and in Plomp and Smoorenburg (1970). A comprehensive discussion is given in Flanagan's book on speech (1972). And, of course, there is the classical treatise of von Bekesy (1960). A com prehensive up-to-date analysis of general brain processes can be found in Sommerhoff (1974); musical psychology is discussed in classical terms in Lundin (1967).

Modeling Psychophysical Data in R

Modeling Psychophysical Data in R PDF

Author: Kenneth Knoblauch

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-09-02

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1461444756

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Many of the commonly used methods for modeling and fitting psychophysical data are special cases of statistical procedures of great power and generality, notably the Generalized Linear Model (GLM). This book illustrates how to fit data from a variety of psychophysical paradigms using modern statistical methods and the statistical language R. The paradigms include signal detection theory, psychometric function fitting, classification images and more. In two chapters, recently developed methods for scaling appearance, maximum likelihood difference scaling and maximum likelihood conjoint measurement are examined. The authors also consider the application of mixed-effects models to psychophysical data. R is an open-source programming language that is widely used by statisticians and is seeing enormous growth in its application to data in all fields. It is interactive, containing many powerful facilities for optimization, model evaluation, model selection, and graphical display of data. The reader who fits data in R can readily make use of these methods. The researcher who uses R to fit and model his data has access to most recently developed statistical methods. This book does not assume that the reader is familiar with R, and a little experience with any programming language is all that is needed to appreciate this book. There are large numbers of examples of R in the text and the source code for all examples is available in an R package MPDiR available through R. Kenneth Knoblauch is a researcher in the Department of Integrative Neurosciences in Inserm Unit 846, The Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute and associated with the University Claude Bernard, Lyon 1, in France. Laurence T. Maloney is Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. His research focusses on applications of mathematical models to perception, motor control and decision making.