Frequently Asked Questions

Dr. Lester M. Sdorow, author of Psychology, answers questions about sensation and perception.

1. What is the importance of psychophysics? It seems pretty boring to me.

Though all of us find some things boring, psychophysics might be perceived as boring because it has not been presented in an interesting manner. Psychophysics is important because it enables us to study how we notice the presence or absence of stimuli and changes in their intensity. For example, this applies to your ability to notice changes in the loudness of your stereo and to determine whether your soup is too salty.

2. My friends and I think men are "more visual" than women, in their tendency to notice things that they see with their eyes. Does research on gender differences support this observation?

If you are referring to the use of vision in social situations, there is much evidence that physical appeal is more important to men than to women in regard to romantic attraction. But research on gender differences has not found that the visual sense is, overall, more important to males than to females.

3. Visual illusions are fun, but do they have any practical applications in society?

Visual illusions are not just fun. They demonstrate that perception is not always a direct representation of physical reality--we often construct perceptions from cues provided in the physical environment. Knowledge of these cues can be used to produce useful illusions. For example, the use of pictorial cues by artists in their drawings and paintings creates an illusion of depth. Knowledge of visual illusions can protect us from harm, as in the design of airport runways to avoid the catastrophic effects of visual illusions.

4. I am fascinated by individual differences in people's experience of pain. Are any of these differences inherited?

Given that we are the product of nature and nurture, it is conceivable. But there have been too few studies of this to draw firm conclusions. There is stronger evidence for ethnic differences in responses to pain. Of course, these difference might be due, in part, to hereditary differences. That possibility remains to be determined.