4.2 Thresholds of Awareness: Can You Really Hear Me?

What are our thresholds for perceiving different stimuli, and how do researchers determine people's true thresholds?

psychophysics

by the philosopher Gustav Fecher, it focuses on the relationship between physical characteristics and magnitude of environmental stimuli and our mental intensity experience of them

absolute thresholds

the minimum amount of stimulation needed for a person to detect a particular stimulus half of the time

the relationship between threshold and sensitivity

they are inverse, higher threshold means lower sensitivity and lower threshold means higher sensitivity

signal detection theory

an approach that measures the thresholds while taking into account the intensity of the stimulus and the psychological biases