The Staircase-Method in Psychophysics

Cornsweet, Tom N.

doi:10.2307/1419876

Cited by 1,124 publications

(573 citation statements)

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“…The psychophysical method of adaptive staircases (Cornsweet, 1962) is used to find a participant's threshold in a task in which the intensity of the stimulus is varied. A simple implementation of this method is to show a participant a series of trials, half of which contain a stimulus and half of which are noise alone.…”

Section: Other Methods For Studying Mental Representationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncovering mental representations with Markov chain Monte Carlo

Sanborn

Griffiths

Shiffrin

2010

Cognitive Psychology

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A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP URL' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. Richard M. Shiffrin Indiana University, Bloomington Abstract A key challenge for cognitive psychology is the investigation of mental representations, such as object categories, subjective probabilities, choice utilities, and memory traces. In many cases, these representations can be expressed as a non-negative function defined over a set of objects. We present a behavioral method for estimating these functions. Our approach uses people as components of a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, a sophisticated sampling method originally developed in statistical physics. Experiments 1 and 2 verified the MCMC method by training participants on various category structures and then recovering those structures. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the MCMC method can be used estimate the structures of the real-world animal shape categories of giraffes, horses, dogs, and cats. Experiment 4 combined the MCMC method with multidimensional scaling to demonstrate how different accounts of the structure of categories, such as prototype and exemplar models, can be tested, producing samples from the categories of apples, oranges, and grapes.

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Section: Other Methods For Studying Mental Representationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncovering mental representations with Markov chain Monte Carlo

Sanborn

Griffiths

Shiffrin

2010

Cognitive Psychology

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“…A modified one-up one-down staircase method was employed. Up and down staircases were randomly interleaved (Cornsweet, 1962). The 15 stereo-motion sequences, which varied in the depth depicted, were rank-ordered.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integration of stereopsis and motion shape cues

Cumming²,

1994

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A global shape judgement task was used to investigate the combination of stereopsis and kinetic depth. With botb cues present, there were no distortions of shape perception, even under conditions where either cue alone did show such distortions. We suggest that the addition of motion information overcomes the stereo distance scaling problem. However, when incongruent combinations of disparity and motion were used, the results did not match predictions of a number of combination theories. These data could be described by a model which used weighted linear combination afier correctly scaling disparities for viewing distance. When the motion cue was weakened by presenting only two frames of each motion sequence, stereo was weighted more heavily.

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“…To this end, after a reversal occurred with a stepsize of 1, a completely new staircase was started with a stepsize of 6, beginning with one of the original, widely spaced, starting values. Up and down staircases were randomly inter-leaved (Cornsweet, 1962). Each experimental run consisted of three up staircases and three down staircases.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integration of depth modules: Stereopsis and texture

Johnston¹,

1993

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Global shape judgements were employed to examine the combination of stereopsis and shape-from-texture in the determination of three-dimensional shape. Adding textural variations to stereograms increased perceived depth. Thus, texture was not simply vetoed by the strong stereo cue. In experiments where the depth specified by texture was incongruent with that specified by stereo, the data were well described by a weighted linear combination rule. Although only a small weight was assigned to texture, this weight was somewhat greater at a farther viewing distance. This could be a consequence of the decreased reliability of stereopsis at far viewing distances.

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The Staircase-Method in Psychophysics

Cited by 1,124 publications

References 0 publications

Uncovering mental representations with Markov chain Monte Carlo

Uncovering mental representations with Markov chain Monte Carlo

Integration of stereopsis and motion shape cues

Integration of depth modules: Stereopsis and texture

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