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Stimulus Programming in Psychophysics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

J. E. Keith Smith
J. E. Keith Smith*
Affiliation:
Lincoln Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Abstract

The appearance of a statistical paper in a symposium honoring the founding of psychophysies was surely to have been expected. These two disciplines had their modern beginnings in about the same period of time and the well-known founders of each made at least some contributions in the other. Karl Pearson’s research on the personal equation is still a good example of painstaking psychophysical experimentation. Indeed much of his statistical reputation rests on techniques he developed to analyze this data. Fifty years ago Urban published, in a psychological journal, the final form of the Müller-Urban weights. Twenty years later biologists rediscovered Urban’s weights and now use them routinely. Spearman, too, contributed to both fields.

Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 1961 , pp. 27 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © 1961 The Psychometric Society

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Footnotes

*

Operated with support from the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force.

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