Empirical and Theoretical Studies of Psychophysical Phenomona

在研究感觉体验时，一个主要的目标是清楚地描述感觉如何与潜在的物理刺激相关。虽然身体刺激和人的行为反应都相对容易观察到，但一个突出的问题是如何处理无法观察到的干预感觉。例如，如果一名患者在10分制中判断疼痛为4分，那么疼痛程度是2分的两倍吗？或者，如果两个人判断疼痛为4分，我们如何比较他们的经历？一个多世纪以来，人们对这些普遍问题进行了深入的研究。尽管有如此悠久的历史和长足的进步，这些问题仍然远未完全解决，部分原因是过去的许多研究没有以可检验的基本假设的形式表示，这些基本假设被表述为明确的数学定律。对这一点的阐述和检验对心理科学的许多领域的进步至关重要。在国家科学基金会的支持下，Duncan Luce博士、Louis Narens博士和Ragnar Steingrimsson博士将继续他们的工作，建立一个普遍的、基于经验的、以数学表达的心理测量基础。特别是，研究人员将把他们的一般方法应用于对感觉的研究。听觉和视觉领域的实验将被用来评估行为公理的充分性，从而评估从行为公理派生的数字表示的充分性。这项研究将他们的理论和实证工作扩展到几个主题，包括刺激呈现的时间或空间顺序的影响，顺序效应，以及评估使用不同方法获得的观察结果是如何关联的。一个重要的方面是表示的充分性可以适应个体差异，而不需要对未指定的函数和自由参数进行任何统计拟合。这个项目的成功进展保证了现在独立的理论的很大程度上的统一，特别是那些涉及强度、频率和呈现顺序的理论，以及以特定领域的方式处理这些问题的理论，以及不同方法之间的关系和评估。

In studying sensory experience, a primary goal is to describe explicitly how sensations relate to the underlying physical stimuli. Although both physical stimuli and a person's behavioral responses are relatively easy to observe, a preeminent problem is to gain a handle on the unobservable intervening sensation. For example, if a patient judges a pain to be 4 on a 10-point scale, is that twice as much pain as a 2? Or, if two people judge a pain to be 4, how can we compare their experiences? For more than a century, these general issues have been studied intensely. Despite that long history and considerable progress, the problems are still far from completely solved, in part, because much past research has not been expressed in the form of testable foundational assumptions, formulated as explicit mathematical laws. The elaboration and testing of such is pivotal to progress in many areas of psychological science. With support of the National Science Foundation, Drs. Duncan Luce, Louis Narens, and Ragnar Steingrimsson will continue their work in establishing a general, empirically-based, mathematically-expressed foundation of psychological measurement. In particular, the investigators will apply their general approach to the study of sensations. Experiments in both the auditory and visual domains will be used to evaluate the adequacy of behavioral axioms and, thus, of the numerical representations derived from them. The research extends their theoretical and empirical work to several topics including the effects of temporal or spatial order of stimulus presentation, sequential effects, and evaluating how observations obtained using different methodologies are related. An important aspect is the adequacy with which representations can accommodate individual differences without any statistical fitting of unspecified functions and free parameters. Successful progress on this program promises much unification of now separate theories, notably those involving intensity, frequency, and presentation order, and theories that treat those in a domain-specific fashion, and the relations between and evaluation of different methodologies.