Stevens' power law

Stevens' power law is a proposed relationship between the magnitude of a physical stimulus and its perceived intensity or strength. It is often considered to supersede the Weber–Fechner law on the basis that it describes a wider range of sensations, although critics argue that the validity of the law is contingent on the virtue of approaches to the measurement of perceived intensity that are employed in relevant experiments. In addition, a distinction has been made between local psychophysics, where stimuli are discriminated only with a certain probability, and global psychophysics, where the stimuli would be discriminated correctly with near certainty (Luce & Krumhansl, 1988). The Weber–Fechner law and methods described by L. L. Thurstone are generally applied in local psychophysics, whereas Stevens' methods are usually applied in global psychophysics.

The theory is named after psychophysicist Stanley Smith Stevens (1906–1973). Although the idea of a power law had been suggested by 19th-century researchers, Stevens is credited with reviving the law and publishing a body of psychophysical data to support it in 1957.

The general form of the law is

where I is the magnitude of the physical stimulus, ψ(I) is the subjective magnitude of the sensation evoked by the stimulus, a is an exponent that depends on the type of stimulation, and k is a proportionality constant that depends on the units used.

The table to the right lists the exponents reported by Stevens.

The principal methods used by Stevens to measure the perceived intensity of a stimulus were magnitude estimation and magnitude production. In magnitude estimation with a standard, the experimenter presents a stimulus called a standard and assigns it a number called the modulus. For subsequent stimuli, subjects report numerically their perceived intensity relative to the standard so as to preserve the ratio between the sensations and the numerical estimates (e.g., a sound perceived twice as loud as the standard should be given a number twice the modulus). In magnitude estimation without a standard (usually just magnitude estimation), subjects are free to choose their own standard, assigning any number to the first stimulus and all subsequent ones with the only requirement being that the ratio between sensations and numbers is preserved. In magnitude production a number and a reference stimulus is given and subjects produce a stimulus that is perceived as that number times the reference. Also used is cross-modality matching, which generally involves subjects altering the magnitude of one physical quantity, such as the brightness of a light, so that its perceived intensity is equal to the perceived intensity of another type of quantity, such as warmth or pressure.

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