Psychophysical Analysis  

Oleh:

Thurstone, L. L.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: The American Journal of Psychology vol. 100 no. 3-4 (1987), page 587.
Topik: Psychophysical Analysis; Method
Fulltext: 1422696.pdf (2.15MB)

Isi artikel

L. L. Thurstone revolutionized classical psychophysics in the 1920s and 1930s, and this article is one of the first shots in that revolution. Thurstone was aware of the new path he was taking because he tells us that the purpose of the paper is "to present a new point of view in psychophysics and to trace some of its implications." In this article Thurstone postulated what became known as the "law of comparative judgement." Rather then looking at the physical and psychological terms of the psychophysical relationship as absolute values, he considered them as distributions. A given physical stimulus does not always produce the same psychological experience. If repeated over and over, the stimulus will produce a distribution of results, what Thurstone calls "discriminable processes" in the psychological dimension. That distribution, Thurstone holds, is normally distributed. This position was not only responsible for a major shift in the way discrimination was considered in psychophysics, it laid the foundation for the normalization and transformation of scores in general psychometrics. It is in this article that Thurstone states: "Psychological measurement depends, then, on the adoption of one of these dispersions as a base, and the use of its standard deviation as a unit of measurement for the psychological continuum under investigation."

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