Recasting (the Near-Miss to) Weber's Law

The authors argue mathematically that a common, power-function model of the just-noticeable difference in stimulus intensities is logically inconsistent with an exponent other than 1 in those frequent situations in which a particular averaging over experimental conditions has taken place. The author...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychological review 2003-04, Vol.110 (2), p.365-375
Main Authors: Doble, Christopher W, Falmagne, Jean-Claude, Berg, Bruce G
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Discrimination
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Logic
Mathematics
Models, Psychological
Perception
Perceptual Discrimination
Psychological Theory
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychophysics
Stimulus Intensity
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Summary:The authors argue mathematically that a common, power-function model of the just-noticeable difference in stimulus intensities is logically inconsistent with an exponent other than 1 in those frequent situations in which a particular averaging over experimental conditions has taken place. The authors show that an alternative power-law model, one which does not share this logical inconsistency, provides a good fit to many well-known, psychoacoustic intensity discrimination data. They also show that the exponent in this alternative model must be nonconstant with the discrimination criterion in experiments implementing this averaging of data.
ISSN:0033-295X
1939-1471
DOI:10.1037/0033-295X.110.2.365