On Fechnerian Laws

In these one or two decades, considerable efforts have been made to determine functional relations, which may be called Fechnerian laws in a broader sense, between subjective or sensory magnitudes and stimulus magnitudes. These functions have led to various scales of sensation, which have fairly good validity for all practical purposes. But, how about the theoretical significance of these Fechnerian laws ? According to the usual scale-construction methodology, the magnitude of sensation is inferred indirectly from a set of judgment-to-stimulus data, assuming a linear relationship between judgment and the underlying sensory response. On the other hand, various physiological or psychophysiological experiments have revealed, more or less directly, the characteristics of the response of the sensory system in question to the relevant stimulus continuum. The examination of the relation of these two sets of data. or expressed more concretely, the comparison of the judged magnitude of sensation with the magnitude of underlying response of the sensory system, should be of great theoretical importance, especially for the analysis of the functional relationships between sensory and judgmental processes in the whole organization of behavior. Along with this line of thought, an attempt was made to relate the subjective brightness (B), obtained by the method of fractionation, to the response strength (P) of the visual system, estimated from the rate of appearance in binocular rivalry experiment. Both B- and P-function were determined for the same subjects and with the same range of stimulus intensities. The B-to-P function thus obtained showed considerable nonlinearity, which was interpreted to reveal how the characteristics of the sensory system would be transformed into those of judgment or verbal responses