Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics and Complexity
- 2 Collective Intelligence: Observations and Models
- 3 Neurodynamics and Electrocortical Activity
- 4 Psychophysics
- 5 Temporal and Spatial Patterns in Perceptual Behavior: Implications for Dynamical Structure
- 6 Embodied and Embedded: The Dynamics of Extracting Perceptual Visual Invariants
- 7 Origins of Order in Cognitive Activity
- 8 Nonlinear Complex Dynamical Systems in Developmental Psychology
- 9 Developmental Psychopathology: Maladaptive and Adaptive Attractors in Children's Close Relationships
- 10 Psychopathology
- 11 Coherence, Complexity, and Information Flow: Self-Organizing Processes in Psychotherapy
- 12 The Dynamics of Human Experience: Fundamentals of Dynamical Social Psychology
- 13 Group Dynamics: Adaptation, Coordination, and the Emergence of Leaders
- 14 Organizational Psychology
- 15 Complexity, Evolution, and Organizational Behavior
- 16 Agent-Based Modeling Within a Dynamic Network
- 17 Epilogue: Psychology at the Edge of Chaos
- Index
4 - Psychophysics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics and Complexity
- 2 Collective Intelligence: Observations and Models
- 3 Neurodynamics and Electrocortical Activity
- 4 Psychophysics
- 5 Temporal and Spatial Patterns in Perceptual Behavior: Implications for Dynamical Structure
- 6 Embodied and Embedded: The Dynamics of Extracting Perceptual Visual Invariants
- 7 Origins of Order in Cognitive Activity
- 8 Nonlinear Complex Dynamical Systems in Developmental Psychology
- 9 Developmental Psychopathology: Maladaptive and Adaptive Attractors in Children's Close Relationships
- 10 Psychopathology
- 11 Coherence, Complexity, and Information Flow: Self-Organizing Processes in Psychotherapy
- 12 The Dynamics of Human Experience: Fundamentals of Dynamical Social Psychology
- 13 Group Dynamics: Adaptation, Coordination, and the Emergence of Leaders
- 14 Organizational Psychology
- 15 Complexity, Evolution, and Organizational Behavior
- 16 Agent-Based Modeling Within a Dynamic Network
- 17 Epilogue: Psychology at the Edge of Chaos
- Index
Summary
Psychophysics: the investigation of the relations between physical stimuli and the psychic action in the production of sensations (1879)
Introduction
It is interesting to find this old definition in one of the world's most prestigious dictionaries of the English language, the Oxford Shorter Dictionary in two volumes “based on historical principles.” Who today writes of “psychic action,” and who would gather that the word emerged in Fechner's 1860 book Elemente der Psychophysik (translated by Adler in 1966)?
To know what actually was intended and what has become the activity of psychophysics, we must both go back in time and then return to the present. Although it is common to write of stimulus–response relations in summarizing the results of quantifying experimental psychology data, it is wiser to write of externally observable events for stimuli and to write specifically of reports of personal sensory experiences or choice actions, leaving responses to include a wide diversity of behaviors, including physiological processes that have no necessary conscious correlates.
Psychophysics usually leads to some mathematical representation of mapping from inputs to outputs, in which the environment is given and the behavior is dependent and the mapping is written outside time, being static and not dynamic. This does not exclude the use of psychophysical methods in studies of topics such as fatigue or vigilance, when behavior is variable and even transiently erratic.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Chaos and Complexity in PsychologyThe Theory of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems, pp. 108 - 131Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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