• measuring human ability to detect and discriminate between different types of perceptual stimuli;
• constructing subjective scales for measurement of perceptual and psychological attributes.

• measure human perception and performance by means of thresholds and other sensitivity indices;
• measure peceptual illusions;
• carry out unidimensional scaling procedures;
• interpret and draw conclusions from psychophysical data;
• use more advanced readings on psychophysics and human perception.

Detection theory: A user's guide,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thurstone, L.L., (1959),

The measurement of values, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Torgerson, W., (1958),

Theory and methods of scaling, New York: Wiley.

• introduction - basic concepts;
• detecion theory - basic matrices, decision space and basic distributions, deriving indices for sensitivity and bias;
• empirical thresholds - measurement procedures;
• scaling - theory and measurement procedures;
• response times and their relation to sensitivity.

Topic 1: Definition of basic notions: stimulus continuum, psychological continuum, response. Measurement and scales of measurement: ordinal, interval and ratio scales. Meaningfulness of statements based on measurements on these scales.

Topic 2: Detection theory. Stimulus trials and catch trials. Basic matrices and probabilities. Estimating performance from the stimulus-response matrix. Examples.

Topic 3: Introduction to the probability theory. Theoretical and empirical distributions. Normal distribution. Transforming probabilities in normal deviate units. Probit analysis.

Topic 4:Internal distributions of the efects of noise and stimulus+noise. Deriving sensitivity index d' and bias index C for the ase of equal variance of the distributions. The "percent correct" measure and the "correction for guessing".

Topic 5: Receiver-operating characteristics (ROC). Payoffs and instructions. Deriving sensitivity index d' and bias for the case of unequal variances of the noise- and stimulus+noise-distributions. Rating method for obtaining ROCs.

Topic 6: Detection and discrimination with trials containing two intervals. Basic probabilities and distributions. Sensitivity index d' and its properties.

Topic 7: The concepts of psychometric curve and empirical threshold. Determining thresholds from experiments with one- and two-interval trials. The concepts of just noticeable difference and point of subjective equality. Perceptual illusions and their measurement.

Topic 8: Procedures for measurement of thresholds and points of subjective equality by analysis of psychometric curves. Non-adaptive and adaptive methods.

Topic 9: Measurements of thresholds and points of subjective equality without analysis of the psychometric curve. Adjustment procedures.

Topic 10: Laboratory work. How to obtain and analyze a psychometric curve. Estimating d' from the psychometric curve.

Topic 11: Laboratory work. Staircase methods. Estimating the point of subjective simultaneity in a visual-auditory task and in a visual-visual task.

Topic 12: The concept of scaling. Subjective equality of equally often noticeable differences. Weber's law and Fechner's postulate. Constructing a scale by summing just noticeable differences. Psychophysical functions and their application.

Topic 13: The paired-comparisons procedure. Basic matrices and construction of a scale. Measures for disagreement between the observers and inconsistency of an observer. Cyclic triads and multidimensionality.

Topic 14: Direct scaling procedures. Fractionation, equisection and direct magnitude estimation. The methods of single stimuli and equal appearing intervals. Psychophysical functions obtained by direct scaling procedures.

Topic 15: Response times. Simple and choice reaction times and their relation to sensitivity. The speed-accuracy trade-off function. Estimating goodness of human performance from the speed-accuracy trade-off.