Psychophysical laws as reflection of mental space properties

Physics of Life Reviews. 2019. Vol. 31. No. 12. P. 276–303.

Lubashevsky I.

The paper is devoted to the relationship between psychophysics and physics of mind. The basic trends in psychophysics development are briefly discussed with special attention focused on Teghtsoonian's hypotheses. These hypotheses pose the concept of the universality of inner psychophysics and enable us to speak about psychological space as an individual object with its own properties. Turning to the two-component description of human behavior I. Lubashevsky (Physics of the human mind, 2017) the notion of mental space is formulated and human perception of external stimuli is treated as the emergence of the corresponding images in the mental space. On one hand, these images are caused by external stimuli and their magnitude bears the information about the intensity of the corresponding stimuli. On the other hand, the individual structure of such images as well as their persistence after emergence is determined only by the properties of mental space on its own. Finally, the mental operations of image comparison and their scaling are defined in a way allowing for the bounded capacity of human cognition. As demonstrated, the developed theory of stimulus perception is able to explain the basic regularities of psychophysics, e.g., (i) the regression and range effects leading to the overestimation of weak stimuli and the underestimation of strong stimuli, (ii) scalar variability (Weber's and Ekman' laws), and (iii) the sequential (memory) effects. As the final result, a solution to the Fechner–Stevens dilemma is proposed. This solution posits that Fechner's logarithmic law is not a consequences of Weber's law but stems from the interplay of uncertainty in evaluating stimulus intensities and the multi-step scaling required to overcome the stimulus incommensurability.

Highlights:

• Inner psychophysics and physics of mind are closely related branches of science.

• Teghtsoonian's hypotheses are implementation of the inner psychophysics universality.

• Perception of external stimuli can be described as emergence of the corresponding images in a certain mental space.

• The formalism of mental space is able to describe the basic regularities of psychophysics based on common principles.

• Fechner's logarithmic law stems from the multi-step scaling required to overcome the stimulus incommensurability.

Keywords: mental space, sensation, inner psychophysics, universality of inner psychophysics, physics of mind, Stevens's law, Fechner's law