Psychology, 5/e   Wortman, Loftus & Weaver
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Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the importance of psychophysics? It seems pretty boring.

It’s usually the “physics” part of “psychophysics” that most people find a bit dull, but really, psychophysics embodies one of the most fundamental questions in all of psychology: what is the relationship between the real (physical) world and our psychological perception of it? And more than most other areas in psychology, psychophysics provided clear, consistent answers. For example, if we hear one tone followed by another that is twice its frequency, we hear the second as “the same” but an octave higher--and this is true regardless of the exact frequency of the first tone. The “laws” of psychophysics--Fechner’s Law, Weber’s Law, etc.-- are among the simplest but most accurate in the entire field of psychology.

2. Visual illusions are fun, but do they have a practical applications?

Certainly. First of all, illusions provide a perfect example of Recurring Theme #2: Psychologists learn about the normal by studying the abnormal. Visual illusions are not just tricks. Rather, they are the result of normal perceptual mechanisms operating in exceptional situations. The Ames’ room illusion, for example, shows that even when binocular vision is disrupted, we can still perceive depth. Your depth perception isn’t failing you in creating this illusion. Rather, it is usually “secondary” cues to reconstruct depth. If we distort those cues, in a ways unlike any you are likely to encounter in the real world, we produce an illusion. Also, most of our audio/video entertainment relies on perceptual illusions. If music in recorded using microphones in more than one location and played it back using more than one speaker--stereo, in other words--we create an auditory illusion of a soundstage, in which we can localize instruments. The instruments are not present, obviously, so reproduced music is an illusion: we are providing our brains information similar to those of a real music event, and our brain creates the perception of music.

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