Gustav Theodor Fechner (/ˈfɛxnər/; German: [ˈfɛçnɐ]; 19 April 1801 – 18 November 1887) was a German physicist, philosopher, and experimental psychologist. A pioneer in experimental psychology and founder of psychophysics (techniques for measuring the mind), he inspired many 20th-century scientists and philosophers. He is also credited with demonstrating the non-linear relationship between psychological sensation and the physical intensity of a stimulus via the formula: , which became known as the Weber–Fechner law.
>>>PUT SHARE BUTTONS HERE<<<
👉 Gustav Fechner in the context of History of psychology
Psychology is defined as "the scientific study of behavior and mental processes". Philosophical interest in the human mind and behavior dates back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Persia, Greece, China, and India.
Psychology as a field of experimental study began in 1854 in Leipzig, Germany, when Gustav Fechner created the first theory of how judgments about sensory experiences are made and how to experiment on them. Fechner's theory, recognized today as Signal Detection Theory, foreshadowed the development of statistical theories of comparative judgment and thousands of experiments based on his ideas (Link, S. W. Psychological Science, 1995). In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychological laboratory dedicated exclusively to psychological research in Leipzig, Germany. Wundt was also the first person to refer to himself as a psychologist. A notable precursor to Wundt was Ferdinand Ueberwasser (1752–1812), who designated himself Professor of Empirical Psychology and Logic in 1783 and gave lectures on empirical psychology at the Old University of Münster, Germany. Other important early contributors to the field include Hermann Ebbinghaus (a pioneer in the study of memory), William James (the American father of pragmatism), and Ivan Pavlov (who developed the procedures associated with classical conditioning).
In this Dossier
Gustav Fechner in the context of Weber–Fechner law
The Weber–Fechner laws are two related scientific laws in the field of psychophysics, known as Weber's law and Fechner's law. Both relate to human perception, more specifically the relation between the actual change in a physical stimulus and the perceived change. This includes stimuli to all senses: vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell.
Ernst Heinrich Weber states that "the minimum increase of stimulus which will produce a perceptible increase of sensation is proportional to the pre-existent stimulus," while Gustav Fechner's law is an inference from Weber's law (with additional assumptions) which states that the intensity of our sensation increases as the logarithm of an increase in energy rather than as rapidly as the increase.
Gustav Fechner in the context of Pairwise comparison (psychology)
Pairwise comparison generally is any process of comparing entities in pairs to judge which of each entity is preferred, or has a greater amount of some quantitative property, or whether or not the two entities are identical. The method of pairwise comparison is used in the scientific study of preferences, attitudes, voting systems, social choice, public choice, requirements engineering and multiagent AI systems. In psychology literature, it is often referred to as paired comparison.
Prominent psychometrician L. L. Thurstone first introduced a scientific approach to using pairwise comparisons for measurement in 1927, which he referred to as the law of comparative judgment. Thurstone linked this approach to psychophysical theory developed by Ernst Heinrich Weber and Gustav Fechner. Thurstone demonstrated that the method can be used to order items along a dimension such as preference or importance using an interval-type scale.