R. Duncan Luce

The major aim of this book is to introduce the ways in which scientists approach and think about a phenomenon -- hearing -- that intersects three quite different disciplines: the physics of sound sources and the propagation of sound through air and other materials, the anatomy and physiology of the transformation of the physical sound into neural activity in the brain, and the psychology of the perception we call hearing. Physics, biology, and psychology each play a role in understanding how and what we hear. The text evolved over the past decade in an attempt to convey something about scientific thinking, as evidenced in the domain of sounds and their perception, to students whose primary focus is not science. It does so using a minimum of mathematics (high school functions such as linear, logarithmic, sine, and power) without compromising scientific integrity. A significant enrichment is the availability of a compact disc (CD) containing over 20 examples of acoustic demonstrations referred to in the book. These demonstrations, which range from echo effects and filtered noise to categorical speech perception and total more than 45 minutes, are invaluable resources for making the text come alive.

This new monograph presents Dr. Luce's current understanding of the behavioral properties people exhibit (or should exhibit) when they make selections among alternatives and how these properties lead to numerical representations of those preferences. It summarizes, and places in historical perspective, the research Dr. Luce has done on utility theory for over 10 years. Included are axiomatic theoretical formulations, experiments designed to test individual assumptions, and analyses of the fit to bodies of data of numerical representations derived from the theory.

This influential treatise presents upper-level undergraduates and graduate students with a mathematical analysis of choice behavior. It begins with the statement of a general axiom upon which the rest of the book rests; the following three chapters, which may be read independently of each other, are devoted to applications of the theory to substantive problems: psychophysics, utility, and learning. Applications to psychophysics include considerations of the Fechnerian assumption and signal detectability theory; discussion of utility theory features unusual results that suggest an experiment to test the theory; and learning-related topics analyze stochastic theories as the basic approach. 1959 ed.

This new monograph presents Dr. Luce's current understanding of the behavioral properties people exhibit (or should exhibit) when they make selections among alternatives and how these properties lead to numerical representations of those preferences. It summarizes, and places in historical perspective, the research Dr. Luce has done on utility theory for over 10 years. Included are axiomatic theoretical formulations, experiments designed to test individual assumptions, and analyses of the fit to bodies of data of numerical representations derived from the theory.

The major aim of this book is to introduce the ways in which scientists approach and think about a phenomenon -- hearing -- that intersects three quite different disciplines: the physics of sound sources and the propagation of sound through air and other materials, the anatomy and physiology of the transformation of the physical sound into neural activity in the brain, and the psychology of the perception we call hearing. Physics, biology, and psychology each play a role in understanding how and what we hear. The text evolved over the past decade in an attempt to convey something about scientific thinking, as evidenced in the domain of sounds and their perception, to students whose primary focus is not science. It does so using a minimum of mathematics (high school functions such as linear, logarithmic, sine, and power) without compromising scientific integrity. A significant enrichment is the availability of a compact disc (CD) containing over 20 examples of acoustic demonstrations referred to in the book. These demonstrations, which range from echo effects and filtered noise to categorical speech perception and total more than 45 minutes, are invaluable resources for making the text come alive.

The major aim of this book is to introduce the ways in which scientists approach and think about a phenomenon -- hearing -- that intersects three quite different disciplines: the physics of sound sources and the propagation of sound through air and other materials, the anatomy and physiology of the transformation of the physical sound into neural activity in the brain, and the psychology of the perception we call hearing. Physics, biology, and psychology each play a role in understanding how and what we hear. The text evolved over the past decade in an attempt to convey something about scientific thinking, as evidenced in the domain of sounds and their perception, to students whose primary focus is not science. It does so using a minimum of mathematics (high school functions such as linear, logarithmic, sine, and power) without compromising scientific integrity. A significant enrichment is the availability of a compact disc (CD) containing over 20 examples of acoustic demonstrations referred to in the book. These demonstrations, which range from echo effects and filtered noise to categorical speech perception and total more than 45 minutes, are invaluable resources for making the text come alive.

Written by a distinguished experimental psychologist, this authoritative volume provides a clear, well-balanced, and comprehensive treatment of the mathematical theory of human response time and the role it plays in our understanding of the mind's structure. Focusing on the conceptual issues entailed in the modelling of response time, Professor Luce rigorously reviews the relevant experimental data and discusses the importance of analyzing data in terms of the hazard function.

Response times are a fascinating source of information on how the mind is organized - the time taken to carry out an action tells us something about the choice process involved. This is a critical but even-handed treatment of the major themes of how response times play a role in our thinking about the mind. Professor Luce provides a comprehensive, clear review of the experimental data, and puts forward the idea of the hazard function - a novel and important approach that he and his colleagues have developed. This function, based on the probability that an reaction is about to occur given that no reaction has occurred so far during a trial, exaggerates the differences that normal analysis methods often obscure. This enables the researcher to rule out more confidently known mechanisms of time delay in human performance. Since measurements of response times are widely used by experimental psychologists as one approach to distinguishing between theories of intellectual functioning, the conceptual arguments that Professor Luce brings to bear on mathematical models of response time are of great relevance to mathematical and experimental psychologists.