Week 3

Senses of Law

Today lecture is mostly about two philosophers which are have a big picture and description on perception and sensation. Those are Fechner and Weberthese two philosophers have a connected meaning through the understand of sensation and the principle of itself.

First is the Fechner’s work, he mentions an interest in primarily in intensity of sensation as a function of physical intensity. So what I could understand is an amount (enough amounts) will be resulting different sensation depends on the objects. Probably, the amount of intensity of physical appearance affects the sensation. One point that is important is comparing two exact looking items is invalid, the best way to understand is by comparing two items with some different, whether physical difference or weight difference.

Furthermore, another person state a Weber’s law which is about the size of JND is a constant fraction of initial stimulus throughout the range of stimuli. JND stands for Just Noticeable Difference. An easy way to capture the JND is by having big gap between the sensations. Mostly it could be easily understand from sounds, a turn from loud volume into quite volume. The reason is JND is always large when the stimulus intensity is high and small when the stimulus intensity is low. The same principle operates across all of our senses. A good statement of Weber’s law is “We are built to detect changes in stimulation and relationship among stimuli.”

So, Fechner add some points into the Weber’s law which is there is a certain amount of how many JND could be able to get the real sensation that will be received. The amount is different based on our sense and all of them are capable to get the sensation if the amount of intensity is received. There are some explanations of this; JND is not capable to receive a certain amount of intensity if the intensity itself is not enough receive by the receptors. Even thought the JND amount for vision sense is the same as the amount of JND for taste sense, but there will be a slight different on how sensitive the difference that will be received by the receptors or the senses. Each senses has a specification if the amount of JND.

The smaller the fraction, the greater the sensitivity will be received by the human. Human being is more sensitive pitch of the sound rather than the loudness of a sound. They will easily notice the different pitch of the sound they hear rather determining the difference of the loudness of volume they heard. In exception of the different volume from loud into quite.