Empirical and Theoretical Studies of Psychophysical Phenomona

在研究感官体验时，一个主要目标是明确地描述感觉如何与潜在的物理刺激相关。虽然物理刺激和一个人的行为反应都相对容易观察，但一个突出的问题是如何处理不可观察的干预感觉。例如，如果一个病人在10分制的量表上判断疼痛为4分，那么疼痛是2分制的两倍吗？或者，如果两个人判断一个疼痛是4，我们如何比较他们的经验？世纪以来，人们一直在深入研究这些普遍性问题。尽管有着悠久的历史和相当大的进步，这些问题仍然远远没有完全解决，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达出来，没有用明确的数学定律来表述。这些的阐述和测试对于心理科学的许多领域的进步至关重要。在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，邓肯吕斯、路易斯·纳伦斯和拉格纳·斯坦格里姆松博士将继续他们的工作，建立一个普遍的、以实验为基础的、以实验为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感觉的研究。在听觉和视觉领域的实验将被用来评估行为公理的充分性，因此，从他们派生的数字表示。 该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如何相关。一个重要的方面是充分的陈述可以容纳个体差异，没有任何统计拟合的未指定的功能和自由参数。这一计划的成功进展，承诺现在分离的理论，特别是那些涉及强度，频率和演示顺序，和理论，治疗那些在特定领域的方式，和不同的方法之间的关系和评估的统一。

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.