Related papers: Psychophysical laws as reflection of mental space …
{G}{ustav} Fechner's 1860 delineation of psychophysics, the measurement of sensation in relation to its stimulus, is widely considered to be the advent of modern psychological science. In psychophysics, a researcher parametrically varies…
The Weber Fechner Law of psychophysics observes that human perception is logarithmic in the stimulus. We present an algorithm for incorporating the Weber Fechner law into loss functions for machine learning, and use the algorithm to enhance…
Even though the phenomenological relations between perception and stimulus have been firmly established, a theoretical argument for Weber's and Fechner's law in terms of relevant models or from statistical physics is largely missing. We…
Autonomous neural systems must efficiently process information in a wide range of novel environments, which may have very different statistical properties. We consider the problem of how to optimally distribute receptors along a…
Sensory arrays made of coupled excitable elements can improve both their input sensitivity and dynamic range due to collective non-linear wave properties. This mechanism is studied in a neural network of electrically coupled (e.g. via gap…
Psychophysics try to relate physical input magnitudes to psychological or neural correlates. Microscopic models to account for macroscopic psychophysical laws, in the sense of statistical physics, are an almost unexplored area. Here we…
Shepard's universal law of generalization is a remarkable hypothesis about how intelligent organisms should perceive similarity. In its broadest form, the universal law states that the level of perceived similarity between a pair of stimuli…
The cognitive frame in which most neuropsychological research on the neural basis of behavior is conducted contains the assumption that brain mechanisms per se fully suffice to explain all psychologically described phenomena. This…
Regular physics is unsatisfactory in that it fails to take into consideration phenomena relating to mind and meaning, whereas on the other side of the cultural divide such constructs have been studied in detail. This paper discusses a…
Understanding mind-brain-environment relations is one of the key topics in psychology. Kurt Lewin, inspired by theoretical physics, tried to establish topological and vector psychology analyzing patterns of interaction between the…
Human brain response is the overall ability of the brain in analyzing internal and external stimuli in the form of transferred energy to the mind/brain phase-space and thus, making the proper decisions. During the last decade scientists…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
We apply the Weber-Fechner's law, which represents the relation between the magnitude of physical stimulus and the magnitude of psychological sense in human being, to the utility function. We conclude that the utility function of n-types of…
Our sensory systems transform external signals into neural activity, thereby producing percepts. We are endowed with an intuitive notion of similarity between percepts, that need not reflect the proximity of the physical properties of the…
Fechner's law and its modern generalizations can be regarded as manifestations of alternative forms of arithmetic, coexisting at stimulus and sensation levels. The world of sensations may be thus described by a generalization of the…
Even during fixation the human eye is constantly in low amplitude motion, jittering over small angles in random directions at up to 100Hz. This motion results in all features of the image on the retina constantly traversing a number of…
Any complete theory of physical reality must allow for the ubiquitous phenomenon of subjective experience at some level, or risk being conceptually incoherent. However, as long as the ontological status of subjectivity itself remains…
Time perception is crucial for a coherent human experience. As life progresses, our perception of the passage of time becomes increasingly non-uniform, often feeling as though it accelerates with age. While various causes for this…
Human similarity judgments are inconsistent with Euclidean, Hamming, Mahalanobis, and the majority of measures used in the extensive literatures on similarity and dissimilarity. From intrinsic properties of brain circuitry, we derive…
Human visual perception is a complex, dynamic and fluctuating process. In addition to the incoming visual stimulus, it is affected by many other factors including temporal context, both external and internal to the observer. In this study…