Psychology 2115A/B Lecture Notes - Absolute Threshold, Psychometric Function, Seashell

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2115A/B
• Professor: Stephen Lupker

Document Summary

When you provide a stimulus it will create sensors that are activated. The question is how strong does that stimulus have to be to activate enough sensory for people to hear it or sense it (absolute threshold) Realizing that there is a threshold that people must pass to sense things. This is called a psychometric function (function that relates a physical intensity that is measured to something) Fechner gave us ideas to calculate the threshold. Fechner came up with some rules and tricks. If fechner was right we would get a graph that looks like a flat like then a straight increase up to 100% and then a flat line from there. Instead we get a increasing wavy line (like one side of a bell curve) Not caused by and anticipation or preservation error needs another explanation. When you listen to a sea shell you do not actually hear the ocean but the brain functions within your ears (spontaneous activity)