Modern Psychophysical And Scaling Methods And Experimentation

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.

Presenting the proceedings of a conference held at Syracuse University in honor of S.S. Stevens, a pioneer in the scaling of sensory magnitudes and the originator of the method of magnitude estimation, this volume brings together the work of 20 authorities on the procedures of ratio scaling. These experts--psychophysicists, physiologists, and theoreticians--offer their views on whether or not psychological magnitudes can be measured and whether the judgments of psychological magnitudes constitute the basis for the construction of a ratio scale. Also discussed is the question of whether any single method could stand out as a potential standard technique for measuring psychological magnitudes.

Primarily intended for the undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychology, this book will help understand the methodology of experiments and the basic concepts of experimental psychology. Since the experiments are described in detail with the help of purely hypothetical data, the readers will easily understand the procedure and the steps involved in each experiment. Complete reports of more than fifty experiments will certainly help understand the significance of each step in an experiment. The detailed description of experiments will also help in conceptualising relevant problems and designing appropriate experiments. Another feature is that, more than half of the experiments described in the book do not require sophisticated apparatus. Key Features • Sample data are provided in each experiment. • Theoretical background of experiments is sufficient and clear. • Sample data are analysed with the help of statistical techniques. • Language is lucid and easy to comprehend. • Experiments on most of the topics have been covered.

The problems of psychophysics -- the scientific study of the relationship between stimulus and sensation -- constitute some of the most basic problems of modern psychology. This book introduces students to the fundamentals of classical and modern psychophysics.