Recasting (the near-miss to) Weber's law.
The authors argue mathematically that a common, power-function model of the just-noticeable difference in stimulus intensities is logically inconsistent with an exponent other than 1 in those frequent situations in which a particular averaging over experimental conditions has taken place. The authors show that an alternative power-law model, one which does not share this logical inconsistency, provides a good fit to many well-known, psychoacoustic intensity discrimination data. They also show that the exponent in this alternative model must be nonconstant with the discrimination criterion in experiments implementing this averaging of data.
Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Irvine 92697, USA. cdoble@aleks.com
Christopher W
CW
Doble
Jean-Claude
JC
Falmagne
Bruce G
BG
Berg
D006801:Humans; D008128:Logic; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011582:Psychological Theory