Psychophysics is the study of the relationship between stimuli and perception. A lot of it is perceptual thresholds, so how much sound or light is needed for someone to hear or see something (fun fact: people can reliably detect a single photon in a dark room at better than chance). Thus much of the experimental protocols boil down to asking “can you hear this?” after playing a sound which is what the Verizon ads always made me think of.
The other half of the discipline is figuring out the wiring on low level perception. For instance we have massive parallel processing in the early visual system that does things like highlight lines and edges, which is what makes the Mach dot/band illusions work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_bands
It’s what I studied in undergrad as it was a nice overlap in my interests in cognitive science, psychology and computer science. I basically just like knowing how everything works :)
More info:
Hey that's actually really cool. Thank you very much for taking the time to explain :) ❤️
My pleasure, I’m always down for nerding out on stuff like this.
Another fun example of the early visual processing is feature detection. The parallel processing allows us to instantly find a green square in a sea of red squares, as it jumps out at you.
But when you combine multiple independent features together (find the green square in a sea of red and green squares and circles) now we have to tediously look around the whole image. That integration of multiple features forces the work higher up in the visual system and takes more time, attention, and effort. Thats why Where’s Waldo is hard.
Does it work in the other direction? Like, how much light can we handle before we go insane?
