Adaptive psychophysical procedures, loss functions, and entropy.
In this article, we present a new strategy for locating a point on a psychometric function (threshold determination) for yes-no procedures, called EntFirst. Our results show that it performs better than many existing strategies for estimating the 50% threshold that are commonly used in nonlaboratory settings. We also provide a review of existing algorithms for finding thresholds, with an emphasis on identifying the types of problems for which each algorithm is useful. Finally, we address a number of issues that are not adequately covered in the literature, including choosing an appropriate loss function to evaluate the performance of an algorithm for a given problem.
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Elena
E
Kelareva
James
J
Mewing
Andrew
A
Turpin
Anthony
A
Wirth
D000465:Algorithms; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D003198:Computer Simulation; D019277:Entropy; D006801:Humans; D011336:Probability; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011601:Psychophysics; D012684:Sensory Thresholds; D013223:Statistics as Topic