1 / 10

Understanding Psychophysics: Measuring the Relationship between Physical Stimuli and Percepts

Explore the subdiscipline of psychophysics, which focuses on measuring the relationship between physical stimuli and subjective percepts. Discover how physical dimensions like light intensity and sound frequency relate to perceptual dimensions like brightness and pitch. Uncover the practical uses of psychophysics in areas such as audibility thresholds, music coding, binaural hearing, masking effects, and military camouflage.

kelleyn
Download Presentation

Understanding Psychophysics: Measuring the Relationship between Physical Stimuli and Percepts

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Introduction Research Methods Fall 2010 Tamás Bőhm

  2. What is psychophysics? • Subdiscipline of experimental psychology • Measuring the relationship between physical stimuli and their subjective correlates (percepts) • Physical dimensions: light intensity, sound intensity, sound frequency etc. • Subjective/perceptual dimensions: brightness, loudness, pitch, etc. • Psychophysics: usually refers to vision • Psychoacoustics: hearing

  3. Why do we need psychophysics? • Physical dimensions ≠perceptual dimensions • Light intensity ≠ brightness http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/

  4. Why do we need psychophysics? • Physical dimensions ≠perceptual dimensions • If you double the intensity of a tone, you won’t hear it twice as loud! (only 60% louder) • If you change the frequency of a tone, loudness will also change (loudness depends both on intensity and on frequency) • Sound intensity ≠ loudness

  5. Why do we need psychophysics? • Physical dimensions ≠ perceptual dimensions

  6. Some practical uses • Absolute threshold of hearing

  7. Some practical uses • Aging and the absolute threshold of hearing Wikipedia

  8. Hearing aids: compensating for audibility loss by measuring individual audibility curves pure-tone audiometry Some practical uses Fletcher, 1929

  9. Mp3 music coding:1:10 compression by applying results from psychoacoustics Absolute and differencethresholds Properties ofbinaural hearing(joint stereo) Masking effects Some practical uses

  10. Military camouflage: detectability of patterns (different shapes and colors) from different viewing distances, under different conditions Some practical uses

More Related