Chater N, Brown G D
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, UK.
Cognition. 1999 Jan 1;69(3):B17-24. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(98)00066-3.
How can the classical psychological laws be explained and unified? It is proposed here that scale-invariance is a unifying principle. Distributions of many environmental magnitudes are observed to be scale invariant; that is, the statistical structure of the world remains the same at different measurement scales [Mandelbrot, B., 1982. The Fractal Geometry of Nature (2nd Edn.). W.H. Freeman, San Francisco, CA; Bak, P., 1997. How Nature Works: The Science of Self-organized Criticality. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK]. We hypothesise that the perceptual-motor system reflects and preserves these scale invariances. This allows derivation of several of the most widely applicable psychological laws governing perception and action across domains and species (Weber's, Stevens', Fitts' and Piéron's Laws). We suggest that these fundamental laws reflect accommodation of the perceptuo-motor system to the scale-invariant physical world and therefore have a common foundation.
经典心理学定律如何得到解释和统一？本文提出尺度不变性是一个统一原则。人们观察到许多环境量的分布是尺度不变的；也就是说，世界的统计结构在不同的测量尺度下保持不变[曼德勃罗，B.，1982年。《自然的分形几何》（第二版）。W.H.弗里曼出版社，加利福尼亚州旧金山；巴克，P.，1997年。《自然如何运作：自组织临界性科学》。牛津大学出版社，英国牛津]。我们假设感知运动系统反映并保留了这些尺度不变性。这使得可以推导出一些在跨领域和物种中最广泛适用的、支配感知和行动的心理学定律（韦伯定律、史蒂文斯定律、菲茨定律和皮埃龙定律）。我们认为这些基本定律反映了感知运动系统对尺度不变的物理世界的适应，因此有一个共同的基础。
