ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to concerns the assessment, by operant methods, of the sensory and perceptual capacities of nonverbal animals. It focuses on research and methods that seek information regarding sensory and perceptual systems. The chapter considers the role of signal detection theory in animal psychophysics, outlining relevant methods and examining the applicability and the usefulness of this approach. A comparable procedure with animals requires a manipulandum for each response alternative. The animal psychophysicist often wishes to study species other than the rats, pigeons, or monkeys for which reinforcers, manipulanda, and general methodology have become standardized. Experimenters have adapted, with this modification, most of the well-known human psychophysical methods, which prescribe the spacing of stimuli around threshold and the order of stimulus presentation. The definition of threshold is somewhat less standardized in the tracking method than in the other methods we have described. Animal subjects have an annoying ability to devise response strategies different from those intended by the experimenter.
