Project Details
Projekt
The Representational Format of Stimulus Intensity
Applicants
Professor Dr. Jürgen Heller; Professor Dr. Rolf Ulrich
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 381713393
Project A1 aims at a deeper understanding of the cognitive representation of perceived stimulus intensity, which, for example, allows people to compare stimulus levels across sensory modalities (i.e., cross-modal matching) and perceive differences in stimulus intensities (i.e., discrimination). We combine two psychophysical approaches to address this issue from a broader empirical and theoretical perspective. The first approach seeks to rigorously investigate the long-standing assumption that cross-modal correspondences are absolute, mediated by an amodal representation. The theory of global psychophysics dissociates the underlying correspondences from decision processes related to respondent-generated internal references, which may explain the observed context dependence of cross-modal judgments. This abstract mathematical theory is necessarily agnostic regarding the physical mechanisms underlying intensity perception. Hence it is supplemented by a second, neurobiologically inspired approach derived from reaction time research. This second approach assumes that the frequency of neural firings in stimulus-generated pulse trains is the cognitive currency of perceived intensity. Common to these two approaches is the hypothesis that a single representation of stimulus intensity is shared across all sensory modalities. In this regard, the representation is amodal because the same encoding strategy is used irrespective of sensory modality.
DFG Programme
Research Units
