Measuring the Soul : Psychophysics for Non-Psychophysicists / Carlo Aleci.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Aleci, Carlo, author.

Series:

Current Natural Sciences

Current Natural Sciences Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Psychophysics.

Neurosciences.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (216 p.)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Les Ulis, France : EDP Sciences, [2021]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Even in the age of Internet, when information and knowledge are just a click away, few probably know what is psychophysics and what is it for. Psychophysics can be romantically defined as the science that measures the soul, namely the sensory soul. Psychophysics estimates the sensibility and looks for the threshold, that ephemeral limit between the sensed and the not sensed, the perceived and the not perceived, the seen and the not seen. It is a challenging task, since this limit is like a butterfly twirling over a flowery meadow, and psychophysics is the tool aimed at measuring as exactly as possible the height of its flight. At the boundary between experimental psychology and sensory neuroscience, psychophysics is not confined within a theoretical framework, but has great importance also in the clinical setting: audiologists, ophthalmologists, optometrists, orthoptists as well as neuropsychiatrists make use of psychophysics in many of their diagnostic protocols. This book aims at describing the principles of this discipline in a simple yet rigorous form, so as to make psychophysics understandable to the broad audience of non-psychophysicists. And, why not, even to reveal its hidden charm.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 Adequate and Inadequate Stimuli

Chapter 2 The Threshold

Chapter 3 The Psychometric Function

Chapter 4 Detection and Discrimination Threshold

Chapter 5 Response Models

Chapter 6 False-Negative and False-Positive Errors (Lapse and Guess Rate)

Chapter 7 Psychophysical Procedures

Chapter 8 Adaptive Psychophysical Procedures

Chapter 9 Nonparametric Adaptive Psychophysical Procedures

Chapter 10 Parametric Adaptive Psychophysical Procedures

Chapter 11 Adaptive Psychophysical Procedures for the Estimate of the Slope

Chapter 12 Multidimensional Adaptive Testing

Chapter 13 What Makes a Psychophysical Technique a Good Psychophysical Technique?

Chapter 14 What is the Best Psychophysical Technique?

Chapter 15 Introduction to the Signal Detection Theory (SDT)

Chapter 16 Suprathreshold Psychophysics

Chapter 17 Brief Outline of Comparative Psychophysics

Afterword The Inverse Problem of Perception

Appendix I Logistic and Weibull Distribution

Appendix II The Maximum Likelihood Estimation

Appendix III Probit Analysis

Appendix IV About Bayes’ Theorem and Bayesian Statistics

References

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9782759825189

2759825183

OCLC:

1241444825