Johnson Kenneth O, Hsiao Steven S, Yoshioka Takashi
Krieger Mind/Brain Institute and Neuroscience Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA.
Neuroscientist. 2002 Apr;8(2):111-21. doi: 10.1177/107385840200800207.
There have been three main ideas about the basic law of psychophysics. In 1860, Fechner used Weber's law to infer that the subjective sense of intensity is related to the physical intensity of a stimulus by a logarithmic function (the Weber-Fechner law). A hundred years later, Stevens refuted Fechner's law by showing that direct reports of subjective intensity are related to the physical intensity of stimuli by a power law. MacKay soon showed, however, that the logarithmic and power laws are indistinguishable without examining the underlying neural mechanisms. Mountcastle and his colleagues did so, and, on the basis of transducer functions obeying power laws, inferred that subjective intensity must be related linearly to the neural coding measure on which it is based. In this review, we discuss these issues and we review a series of studies aimed at the neural mechanisms of a very complex form of subjective experience-the experience of roughness produced by a textured surface. The results, which are independent of any assumptions about the form of the psychophysical law, support the idea that the basic law of psychophysics is linearity between subjective experience and the neural activity on which it is based.
关于心理物理学的基本定律，主要有三种观点。1860年，费希纳运用韦伯定律推断出，强度的主观感受与刺激的物理强度通过对数函数相关联（韦伯 - 费希纳定律）。一百年后，史蒂文斯通过表明主观强度的直接报告与刺激的物理强度通过幂定律相关，反驳了费希纳定律。然而，麦凯很快指出，如果不研究潜在的神经机制，对数定律和幂定律是无法区分的。芒卡斯尔及其同事进行了这样的研究，并基于遵循幂定律的换能器功能推断出，主观强度必定与其所基于的神经编码测量呈线性相关。在这篇综述中，我们讨论这些问题，并回顾一系列针对一种非常复杂的主观体验形式——有纹理表面产生的粗糙度体验——的神经机制的研究。这些结果独立于任何关于心理物理定律形式的假设，支持了心理物理学的基本定律是主观体验与其所基于的神经活动之间的线性关系这一观点。
