Psychophysics: Introduction to Its Perceptual, Neural and Social Prospects

Psychophysics is a lively account by one of experimental psychology's seminal figures of his lifelong scientific quest for general laws governing human behavior. It is a landmark work that captures the fundamental themes of Stevens's experimental research and his vision of what psycho-physics and psychology are and can be. The context of this modern classic is detailed by Lawrence Marks's pungent and highly revealing introduction. The search for a general psychophysical law―a mathematical equation relating sensation to stimulus―pervades this work, first published in 1975. Stevens covers methods of measuring human psychophysical behavior: magnitude estimation, magnitude production, and cross-modality matching are used to examine sensory mechanisms, perceptual processes, and social consensus. The wisdom in this volume lies in its exposition of an approach that can apply generally to the study of human behavior.