PSYC 303 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Middle Ear, Incus, Absolute Threshold

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 303
• Professor: Thomas Spalek

Document Summary

Error preservation: when people get into the habit of making a response when presented with only one order (so for example only being presented w/ ascending order). If you use both, then the preservation error cancels out: 2. To cancel this out, you use multiple trials and types of ascending and descending and also start at different levels. So this is used to catch people making guesses so you can essentially catch someone who is fibbing when no stimuli is presented in the first place. So there is background noise that causes variability which is fed to the system as well as the stimuli being present (so activity in brain may be the result of external noise as well). So b/c there is other activity in the system that isn"t due to stimulus, it will make the system more or less sensitive at different points at time.