Scanning the Issue

Gustav Fechner’s 1860 delineation of psychophysics, the measurement of sensation in relation to its stimulus, is widely considered to be the advent of modern psychological science. In psychophysics, a researcher parametrically varies some aspects of a stimulus and measures the resulting changes in a human subject’s experience of that stimulus; doing so gives insight to the determining relationship between a sensation and the physical input that evoked it. This approach is used heavily in perceptual domains, including signal detection, threshold measurement, and ideal observer analysis. Scientific fields, such as vision science, have always leaned heavily on the methods and procedures of psychophysics, but there is now growing appreciation of them by machine learning researchers, sparked by widening overlap between biological and artificial perception. Machine perception that is guided by behavioral measurements, as opposed to guidance restricted to arbitrarily assigned human labels, has significant potential to fuel further progress in artificial intelligence.