Die Repräsentation wahrgenommener Intensität

01/12/2020 to 30/11/2023

People can match the intensities of auditory and visual stimuli, which suggests that intensity is represented on a common scale within the cognitive system. Psychophysical research has usually addressed this phenomenon with mathematical accounts by assuming that the matching is based on an amodal representation of stimulus intensity. However, these approaches left open the nature of this representation. Therefore, this project combines mathematical accounts with concepts and experimental paradigms from cognitive psychology to shed light on the nature of this representation, and to put the assumption of a common intensity scale to an empirical test within a formal framework. Specifically, we will examine whether this representation is spatial in nature, as it has been demonstrated to be for other magnitudes (e.g., numbers, pitch, time).