What is psychophysics?
 

    Psychophysics is the area of psychology that attempts to find the relationship between a physical magnitude and the corresponding perceived or subjective magnitude (Haber and Hershenson, 1980). Psychophysics aims to achieve four goals. Psychophysics aims to determine the point of detection of a stimuli, that is, whether a stimulus is detectable or not (e.g., how loud should an alarm be set to ensure that all occupants of a building are able to detect it?). Psychophysics aims to determine how stimuli are recognized (e.g., how do you know if something is an airplane or a bird?). Psychophysics also aims to determine when stimuli can be discriminated from one another (e.g., is there a difference in taste between a product made by one brand and the same product made by another brand?). The final aim of psychophysics is to determine how much sensory information is there (e.g., monitoring your pace when trying to maintain a 7 minute mile). This is the scaling question of psychophysics and is important in situations when a person must evaluate the amount of a particular stimulus present in the task (Allard, 2001).