Fechner's conception of psychophysics included both “outer psychophysics” the relation between stimulus intensity and the response reflecting sensation strength, and “inner psychophysics” the relation between neurelectric responses and sensation strength. In his own time outer psychophysics focussed on the form of the psychophysical law, with Fechner espousing a logarithmic law, Delboeuf a variant of the logarithmic law incorporating a resting level of neural activity, and Plateau a power law. One of the issues on which the dispute was focussed concerned the (...) appearance of contrasts if the overall illumination was increased or decreased; another issue was the question of whether a sensation of a “just noticeable difference” established for one value of a sensory dimension appeared the same for a value elsewhere on the dimension. The development of “inner psychophysics” led through the works of Delboeuf, Solomons, Jastrow, and Thurstone to modern signal detection theory. A third line of research, devoted to the question of what was meant by the “measurement” of sensation strength, stemmed from the criticism of Fechner's work by von Kries (1882) and others. Although a valid body of science could be built up without the intervening variable called “sensation strength,” such a science might be a cumbersome representation of reality. When an optical contrast is set up, and its overall illumination is increased or decreased, subjective contrasts involving medium levels of lightness vary little as illumination varies (as a power law based on sensation ratios or a logarithmic law based on sensation differences predict), but subjective contrasts involving extreme levels of lightness might be subject to the effects of other variables. (shrink)

Whether visual perceptual consciousness is gradable or dichotomous has been the subject of fierce debate in recent years. If perceptual consciousness is gradable, perceivers may have less than full access to—and thus be less than fully phenomenally aware of—perceptual information that is represented in working memory. This raises the question: In virtue of what can a subject be less than fully perceptually conscious? In this chapter, we provide an answer to this question, according to which inexact categorizations of visual input (...) may result in a representation of the visual information in working memory that is less than fully available to the perceiver, and of which the perceiver is therefore less than fully phenomenally aware. The latter proposal is a natural extension of a theory of perception we have proposed in previous works, namely, the template tuning theory (TTT). We argue that although TTT is compatible with both gradable and dichotomous conceptions of perceptual consciousness, the available empirical evidence favours a gradable conception of perceptual consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper we contrast bounded and ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Ecological approaches to rationality build on the idea of humans as “intuitive statisticians” while we argue for a more generative conception of humans as “probing organisms.” We first highlight how ecological rationality’s focus on cues and statistics is problematic for two reasons: the problem of cue salience, and the problem of cue uncertainty. We highlight these problems by revisiting the statistical and cue-based logic that underlies (...) ecological rationality, which originate from the misapplication of concepts in psychophysics. We then work through the most popular experimental task in the ecological rationality literature—the city size task—to illustrate how psychophysical assumptions have informally been linked to ecological rationality. After highlighting these problems, we contrast ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Generative rationality builds on biology—in contrast to ecological rationality’s focus on statistics. We argue that in uncertain environments cues are rarely given or available for statistical processing. Therefore we focus on the psychogenesis of awareness rather than psychophysics of cues. For any agent or organism, environments “teem” with indefinite cues, meanings and potential objects, the salience or relevance of which is scarcely obvious based on their statistical or physical properties. We focus on organism-specificity and the organism-directed probing that shapes awareness and perception. Cues in teeming environments are noticed when they serve as cues-for-something, requiring what might be called a “cue-to-clue” transformation. In this sense, awareness toward a cue or cues is actively “grown.” We thus argue that perception might more productively be seen as the presentation of cues and objects rather than their representation. This generative approach not only applies to relatively mundane organism interactions with their environments—as well as organism-object relationships and their embodied nature—but also has significant implications for understanding the emergence of novelty in economic settings. We conclude with a discussion of how our arguments link with—but modify—Herbert Simon’s popular “scissors” metaphor, as it applies to bounded rationality and its implications for decision making in uncertain, teeming environments. (shrink)