Abstract
The kickoff lecture of the symposium will introduce continuous psychophysics, describe recent results from the Burge and Bonnen laboratories, and conclude with a real-time, audience-involved, data-collection and data-analysis demonstration.
Continuous psychophysics is a new methodological approach gaining traction in vision science. Participants continuously track a rapidly changing target with an effector (e.g. a mouse, a finger, the eyes) while the target and response are monitored over time. Traditional psychophysical variables can be estimated rapidly, while simultaneously collecting information about temporal processing dynamics that is typically absent from traditional datasets. Strikingly, the value of the variables estimated with continuous psychophysics often tightly track those estimated with traditional forced-choice methods. Continuous psychophysics is positioned to become a powerful tool for measuring perception and behavior.
Bonnen, Burge and others (including those speaking in the symposium) have used continuous psychophysics to investigate a variety of topics. Bonnen has used it to obtain accurate estimates of location sensitivity, and show that processing motion in depth is slower than processing motion in the frontal plane. Burge has used continuous psychophysics to obtain estimates of visual processing latency and the duration of temporal integration having millisecond-scale precision. We will briefly discuss these results and preview the work of other symposium participants.
The real-time demonstration will engage symposium attendees in data collection across two experimental conditions. We will show how continuous psychophysics can be used to estimate temporal response functions, temporal integration windows, and the differences in temporal processing across conditions.