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How does the human nervous system respond to the intensity of a source of light, or the loudness of a sound? This question was first investigated by Fechner in the 19th century; historians often date the beginning of scientific psychology to Fechner’s work1.
Fechnerian psychophysics is based on the idea that an appropriately chosen measure of local discriminability in a continuous stimulus space (the degree with which an observer can discriminate a stimulus from its very close neighbors) can be used to compute “subjective” distances between very close stimuli; and that by appropriately integrating these small distances along paths connecting different stimuli one can compute “subjective” (Fechnerian) distances among all stimuli comprising the space. This idea, together with experimental procedures for measuring local discriminability,2 for unidimensional stimulus continua (such as the space of fixed-frequency tones varying in intensity, or visually presented line segments varying in length).
References
- Dzhafarov, E. N., & Colonius, H. (1999). Fechnerian metrics in unidimensional and multidimensional stimulus spaces. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 6, 239-268.
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