Psychology Wiki
Register
Advertisement

Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language | Individual differences | Personality | Philosophy | Social |
Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |

Cognitive Psychology: Attention · Decision making · Learning · Judgement · Memory · Motivation · Perception · Reasoning · Thinking  - Cognitive processes Cognition - Outline Index


An absolute threshold (also known variously as the detection threshold, objective threshold, absolute limen, Retz limen, sensation threshold, or absolute sensitivity) is a sensory threshold and is the minimum amount of stimulation required for a person's sense organs to detect a stimulus fifty percent of the time. The concept can be applied to all senses as in:

Originally it was thought that there was some absolute levels which reflected human consciousness,, but later signal detection experiments revealed a gradual onset of detection reflecting probabilities of response to a stimulus at different intensities or levels of the target.


Gustav Fechner did much of the early work determining the absolute thresholds for the sensory modalities. He used three main methods:

Particular thresholds[]


See also[]


References & Bibliography[]

Key texts[]

Books[]

Papers[]

Additional material[]

Books[]

Papers[]

External links[]

Advertisement