Psychophysics

Concerned with the four perceptual problems of:

  1. Detection
  2. Identification
  3. Discrimination
  4. Scaling
Absolute thresholds are often used as the index of an individuals sensitivity to a specific stimuli, or differences between stimuli.

Basic assumption in doing psychophysics is that any type of behaviour has some strength. In Psychophysics the measure of strength most often used is response probability.

Gustav Theodor Fechner (1860) defined the absolute threshold as the stimulus that "lifted the sensation or sensory difference over the threshold of consciousness"