Sensory Neuroscience: Four Laws of Psychophysics

Sensory Neuroscience: Four Laws of Psychophysics organizes part of psychophysics -- a science of quantitative relationships between human sensations and the stimuli that evoke them. Although psychophysics belongs to sensory neuroscience, and is coupled to neurophysiology, it has also branched out to various specialized disciplines, including the disciplines of vision and hearing, ophthalmology, optometry, otology, and audiology. Due to this diversification and fragmentation, psychophysics has had an ad-hoc, phenomenological orientation. Besides Weber’s law of differential sensitivity, and the still-controversial Stevens’ power law, it has lacked a systematic grid of scientific laws.

Sensory Neuroscience:  Four Laws of Psychophysics provides valid unifying principles and systematic applications for this otherwise fragmented precursor of experimental psychology, and defines four multisensory relationships of substantial generality between sensations and the underlying stimulus variables. This book will be particularly useful to auditory researchers, experimental psychologists, and behavioral neuroscientists.

 

Preface.- Stevens’ Power Law: Definition and Genesis.- Theory of Magnitude Estimation.- Magnitude Production and Magnitude Balance.- Cross-modal Matching and Transitivity.-Relevant Theory of Measurement.- Validity of the Power Law.- Generality.- The Context Problem.- Physiological Correlates.- Law of Asymptotic Linearity: Definition and Genesis.- Underlying Biophysical Process.- Generality.- Law of Additivity: Definition and Consistency with Ratio Scaling.- Further Validation of the Law for Loudness.- Generality.- General Law of Differential Sensitivity: Introduction.- Weber’s Fraction Independent of the Rate of Response Growth.- The Generalized Law of Differential Sensitivity.- Index.

 Dr. Jozef Zwislocki holds a Sc.D. degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and two Dr. h. c. degrees from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland and Syracuse University respectively. He is a member of the American and Polish Academies of Sciences and the recipient of numerous research awards. Dr. Zwislocki started his research career as the director of the electroacoustic laboratory in the department of otolaryngology of the University of Basel, Switzerland. From 1951 to 1957, he was a research fellow at Harvard’s Psychoacoustic Laboratory in the department of Experimental Psychology before joining the Faculty of Syracuse University. There, he organized and directed in succession the Bioacoustic Laboratory at the G. D. Hoople Hearing and Speech Center, the Laboratory of Sensory Communication, and the Institute for Sensory Research at the L. C. Smith College of Engineering. He has held the position of a research professor of otolaryngology and communication sciences at the New York State Upstate Medical Center. Though he retired from his directorship at the Institute in 1984, he is currently continuing his research work as both a distinguished professor of neuroscience emeritus at Syracuse University.