Selected Developments in Psychophysics, with Implications for Sensory Organization

This chapter outlines selected recent developments in psychophysics that may be relevant to problems of sensory organization. It is assumed in this discussion that psychophysics is concerned primarily with “terminal” activities, in that specified sensory inputs are related to specified behavioral outputs, without direct observation of the complexity of intermediate neural events. Psychophysical data are thus necessary, but not sufficient, for a complete model of sensory organization. From this point of view, psychophysics is examined to suggest crude alternative models or broad strategies of action for approaches to the sensory organization of the human observer. All references to the nervous system in this chapter refer to a conceptual nervous system that serves between the terminal activities of stimulus and response.