R. Duncan Luce - Böcker

Response times are a fascinating source of information on how the mind is organized - the time taken to carry out an action tells us something about the choice process involved. This is a critical but even-handed treatment of the major themes of how response times play a role in our thinking about the mind. Professor Luce provides a comprehensive, clear review of the experimental data, and puts forward the idea of the hazard function - a novel and important approach that he and his colleagues have developed. This function, based on the probability that an reaction is about to occur given that no reaction has occurred so far during a trial, exaggerates the differences that normal analysis methods often obscure. This enables the researcher to rule out more confidently known mechanisms of time delay in human performance.Since measurements of response times are widely used by experimental psychologists as one approach to distinguishing between theories of intellectual functioning, the conceptual arguments that Professor Luce brings to bear on mathematical models of response time are of great relevance to mathematical and experimental psychologists.

Written by a distinguished experimental psychologist, this authoritative volume provides a clear, well-balanced, and comprehensive treatment of the mathematical theory of human response time and the role it plays in our understanding of the mind's structure. Focusing on the conceptual issues entailed in the modelling of response time, Professor Luce rigorously reviews the relevant experimental data and discusses the importance of analyzing data in terms of the hazard function.

The major aim of this book is to introduce the ways in which scientists approach and think about a phenomenon -- hearing -- that intersects three quite different disciplines: the physics of sound sources and the propagation of sound through air and other materials, the anatomy and physiology of the transformation of the physical sound into neural activity in the brain, and the psychology of the perception we call hearing. Physics, biology, and psychology each play a role in understanding how and what we hear.The text evolved over the past decade in an attempt to convey something about scientific thinking, as evidenced in the domain of sounds and their perception, to students whose primary focus is not science. It does so using a minimum of mathematics (high school functions such as linear, logarithmic, sine, and power) without compromising scientific integrity. A significant enrichment is the availability of a compact disc (CD) containing over 20 examples of acoustic demonstrations referred to in the book. These demonstrations, which range from echo effects and filtered noise to categorical speech perception and total more than 45 minutes, are invaluable resources for making the text come alive.

The major aim of this book is to introduce the ways in which scientists approach and think about a phenomenon -- hearing -- that intersects three quite different disciplines: the physics of sound sources and the propagation of sound through air and other materials, the anatomy and physiology of the transformation of the physical sound into neural activity in the brain, and the psychology of the perception we call hearing. Physics, biology, and psychology each play a role in understanding how and what we hear. The text evolved over the past decade in an attempt to convey something about scientific thinking, as evidenced in the domain of sounds and their perception, to students whose primary focus is not science. It does so using a minimum of mathematics (high school functions such as linear, logarithmic, sine, and power) without compromising scientific integrity. A significant enrichment is the availability of a compact disc (CD) containing over 20 examples of acoustic demonstrations referred to in the book. These demonstrations, which range from echo effects and filtered noise to categorical speech perception and total more than 45 minutes, are invaluable resources for making the text come alive.

Based on a conference held in honor of Professor Tarow Indow, this volume is organized into three major topics concerning the use of geometry in perception: * space -- referring to attempts to represent the subjective space within which we locate ourselves and perceive objects to reside; * color -- dealing with attempts to represent the structure of color percepts as revealed by various experimental procedures; and * scaling -- focusing on the organization of various bodies of data -- in this case perceptual -- through scaling techniques, primarily multidimensional ones. These topics provide a natural organization of the work in the field, as well as one that corresponds to the major aspects of Indow's contributions. This book's goal is to provide the reader with an overview of the issues in each of the areas, and to present current results from the laboratories of leading researchers in these areas.

This new monograph presents Dr. Luce's current understanding of the behavioral properties people exhibit (or should exhibit) when they make selections among alternatives and how these properties lead to numerical representations of those preferences. It summarizes, and places in historical perspective, the research Dr. Luce has done on utility theory for over 10 years. Included are axiomatic theoretical formulations, experiments designed to test individual assumptions, and analyses of the fit to bodies of data of numerical representations derived from the theory.

This new monograph presents Dr. Luce's current understanding of the behavioral properties people exhibit (or should exhibit) when they make selections among alternatives and how these properties lead to numerical representations of those preferences. It summarizes, and places in historical perspective, the research Dr. Luce has done on utility theory for over 10 years. Included are axiomatic theoretical formulations, experiments designed to test individual assumptions, and analyses of the fit to bodies of data of numerical representations derived from the theory.

Based on a conference held in honor of Professor Tarow Indow, this volume is organized into three major topics concerning the use of geometry in perception: * space -- referring to attempts to represent the subjective space within which we locate ourselves and perceive objects to reside; * color -- dealing with attempts to represent the structure of color percepts as revealed by various experimental procedures; and * scaling -- focusing on the organization of various bodies of data -- in this case perceptual -- through scaling techniques, primarily multidimensional ones. These topics provide a natural organization of the work in the field, as well as one that corresponds to the major aspects of Indow's contributions. This book's goal is to provide the reader with an overview of the issues in each of the areas, and to present current results from the laboratories of leading researchers in these areas.

The major aim of this book is to introduce the ways in which scientists approach and think about a phenomenon -- hearing -- that intersects three quite different disciplines: the physics of sound sources and the propagation of sound through air and other materials, the anatomy and physiology of the transformation of the physical sound into neural activity in the brain, and the psychology of the perception we call hearing. Physics, biology, and psychology each play a role in understanding how and what we hear.The text evolved over the past decade in an attempt to convey something about scientific thinking, as evidenced in the domain of sounds and their perception, to students whose primary focus is not science. It does so using a minimum of mathematics (high school functions such as linear, logarithmic, sine, and power) without compromising scientific integrity. A significant enrichment is the availability of a compact disc (CD) containing over 20 examples of acoustic demonstrations referred to in the book. These demonstrations, which range from echo effects and filtered noise to categorical speech perception and total more than 45 minutes, are invaluable resources for making the text come alive.

This book tries to sort out the different meanings of uncertainty and to discover their foundations. It shows that uncertainty can be represented using various tools and mental guidelines. Coverage also examines alternative ways to deal with risk and risk attitude concepts. Behavior under uncertainty emerges from this book as something to base more on inquiry and reflection rather than on mere intuition.