Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical
stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they affect. Psychophysics has been described as
"the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation"[1] or, more completely, as
"the analysis of perceptual processes by studying the effect on a subject's experience or behaviour of systematically varying the properties of a stimulus along one or more physical dimensions".
[2]
Psychophysics also refers to a general class of methods that can be applied to study a perceptual system. Modern applications tend to rely heavily on
ideal observer analysis and
signal detection theory.
[3]
Psychophysics has important practical applications. For example, in the study of
digital signal processing psychophysics has informed the development of models and methods of
lossy compression. These models explain why humans perceive very little loss of signal quality when audio and video signals are formatted using lossy compression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychophysics
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