UIUC Quant Brownbag

Since the late 1800s, the field of psychophysics has painstakingly described the relationship between physical properties of the world and an observer’s experiences of those properties. Fechner (1860), Weber, Stevens — these are names we all know from our introductory textbooks as pioneers in laying the groundwork for explaining how our minds represent the physical world and act upon those representations. Shortly after the first psychophysical work, others also (namely, Pierce & Jastrow, 1884) became fascinated by the apparent disconnect between what an observer could objectively discriminate and what they could introspectively feel confident in discriminating. However, thanks to the rejection of introspection as a viable target of scientific study due to Freud’s pseudoscience, we all collectively ignored this fascinating topic for at least 70 years. Now, we are tasked with rebuilding the psychophysical study of introspection out of the ashes of behaviorism and the cognitive revolution. But it is working: in the past 20 years, we have seen a resurgence of interest in the quantitative study of introspection (Peters, 2022; Kamerer & Frankish, 2023). In this talk I will describe what I see as the path forward towards "introspective psychophysics": the process relating introspective evaluation to objective (perhaps unconscious) representations/behaviors, including progress we have made and analytical approaches we are building. I will present data and paradigms we have designed and tested, and place these in context with theoretical work linking the quantitative study of introspection to phenomenology in general.