ABSTRACT
Already in the eighteenth century, advances in physics had given scientists the idea that it might be possible to understand human functions, particularly human perception, by developing methods derived directly from physics (→PERCEPTION). As suggested by its name, coined in 1860 by Gustav Fechner in his Elemente der Psychophysik, psychophysics attempts to develop measurement methods for psychology modeled after physics. The measures are defined statistically from the subjects’ response distributions.
