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

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus PP Package 2021 Part 2
• VerfasserIn: Aleci, Carlo,
• Place / Publishing House: Les Ulis : : EDP Sciences, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Current Natural Sciences
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (218 p.)

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.

Table of 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