ShmoopTube

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here's your shmoop du jour brought to you by bell bottom jeans.

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early design sketches also included whiffle's but we're deemed too clunky.

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bell bottom. alright here's today's question research conducted in the 1960s [man in baggy jeans frowns]

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and 1970s led to the understanding that the physical power of a stimulus ie how

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loud a sound is- is related to our perception of the magnitude of that

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stimulus. researchers that determined this was puma .and here are the potential

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answers. alright let's run down what each researcher was best known for. starting

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with Fechner. gustav fechner was a german philosopher physicist and psychologist

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best known as an early pioneer of Experimental Psychology. fechner was

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credited with introducing the median into formal data analysis developing the

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fechner color effect- an illusion that causes people to see color when looking

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rapidly moving black and white patterns as well as producing the Weber Fechner

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law which combines his own work with that of Ernst Heinrich Weber. yeah.

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unfortunately the fetch new color illusion doesn't work on computer screen

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so showing it to you would be pointless. try to contain your disappointment there.

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anyway. Ernst was along with spatula another key founder of

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Experimental Psychology and psychophysics often working with [Fetchner and Weber pictured]

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sensation and touch. well the Weber Fechner law was a proposed relationship

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between the magnitude of the physical stimulus and entity or strength that

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people feel. sounds a lot like the question huh? I'm sure it could work that

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is if Weber-fechner who actually work in the sixties and seventies and not

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when they actually worked which was in the 19th century. going cross out a and

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c. our next choice Leon Fetchner. he at least fits the time period he was born

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in nineteen nineteen and died in 1989. unfortunately for us he was a social

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psychologist best known for his social comparison theory as well as his work in

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cognitive dissonance. while focusing on the latter for a second. festinger [social comparison theory explained]

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believe that humans strove for internal consistency, so when two conflicting

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ideas creating the internal tension within someone, for example they know

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smoking gives you cancer but continue smoking

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anyway, they simply ignore the conflict all together in order to continue living

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a happy life. everyone owes cognitive dissonance a bit of us thank you because

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without it we probably wouldn't be able to have our weekly pizza and ice cream

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parties without breaking down and sobbing afterwards. we all get fat

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and bad stuff they put in our bodies. great research but not our answer. well

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Georg Ilyas ruler was another significant German psychologist renowned

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for his work on a phenomenon called retroactive interference, which describes

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when newly learned information causes us problems recalling old information. it's [man peers thoughtfully at the sky]

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like if you were in the middle of learning Spanish but took a year abroad

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in rome to learn italian when you return to your spanish class you'd probably

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find yourself slipping into italiano which is not muy bien that's retroactive

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interference. interesting yes but not the answer we're looking for when cross out

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e the actual answer we're looking for is s. s Stephens. he's best

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known Stephens power law. it's very similar to the vember Fechner law but

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it's considered superior since it describes a wider range of sensations. it

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was also developed in the 60s and 70s so it fits just as well as our

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bell-bottom jeans. Fetchner-weber have ever laid the foundations for the theory that the

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larger the magnitude of a stimulus the larger the just noticeable difference. [field of sunflowers]

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take 20 watt light bulb in a 40 watt light bulb. they looks very different

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because one is twice as powerful as the other, but if you were to take 140 watt and

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160 watt light bulb now they look more or less the same even though they're

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just is different numerically, as the 20 and 40 watt bulbs their work was great

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but it fell short once you got into extreme values and also failed to cover

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many different kinds of stimuli. Stephens improve the theory by introducing an

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exponential function to the complex equation and we're not even going to try

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and tackle here. ultimately he filled the holes left by previous theorists. so b is

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the answer we're looking for B is in bell bottom blues, if we only had a handy

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whistle we can blow it in celebration. dare to dream bell bottom blues make me [ man with bells and whistles attached to jeans]

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cry.

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