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In the branch of experimental psychology focused on sensation and perception, psychophysics, a just-noticeable difference or JND is the amount something must be changed in order for a difference to be noticeable, detectable at least half the time. 〔''Weber's Law of Just Noticeable Difference'', University of South Dakota: http://apps.usd.edu/coglab/WebersLaw.html〕〔''What does jnd.org mean?'', http://jnd.org/about.html#jnd〕 It is also known as the difference limen, differential threshold, or least perceptible difference. ==Explanation== For many sensory modalities, over a wide range of stimulus magnitudes sufficiently far from the upper and lower limits of perception, the 'JND' is a fixed proportion of the reference sensory level, and so the ratio of the JND/reference is roughly constant (that is the JND is a constant proportion/percentage of the reference level). Measured in physical units, we have: : where is the original intensity of the particular stimulation, is the addition to it required for the change to be perceived (the JND), and ''k'' is a constant. This rule was first discovered by Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878), an anatomist and physiologist, in experiments on the thresholds of perception of lifted weights. A theoretical rationale (not universally accepted) was subsequently provided by Gustav Fechner, so the rule is therefore known either as the Weber Law or as the Weber–Fechner law; the constant ''k'' is called the Weber constant. It is true, at least to a good approximation, of many but not all sensory dimensions, for example the brightness of lights, and the intensity and the pitch of sounds. It is not true, however, of the wavelength of light. Stanley Smith Stevens argued that it would hold only for what he called ''prothetic'' sensory continua, where change of input takes the form of increase in intensity or something obviously analogous; it would not hold for ''metathetic'' continua, where change of input produces a qualitative rather than a quantitative change of the percept. Stevens developed his own law, called Stevens' Power Law, that raises the stimulus to a constant power while, like Weber, also multiplying it by a constant factor in order to achieve the perceived stimulus. The JND is a statistical, rather than an exact quantity: from trial to trial, the difference that a given person notices will vary somewhat, and it is therefore necessary to conduct many trials in order to determine the threshold. The JND usually reported is the difference that a person notices on 50% of trials. If a different proportion is used, this should be included in the description—for example one might report the value of the "75% JND". Modern approaches to psychophysics, for example signal detection theory, imply that the observed JND, even in this statistical sense, is not an absolute quantity, but will depend on situational and motivational as well as perceptual factors. For example, when a researcher flashes a very dim light, a participant may report seeing it on some trials but not on others. The JND formula has an objective interpretation (implied at the start of this entry) as the disparity between levels of the presented stimulus that is detected on 50% of occasions by a particular observed response (Torgerson, 1958), rather than what is subjectively "noticed" or as a difference in magnitudes of consciously experienced 'sensations'. This 50%-discriminated disparity can be used as a universal unit of measurement of the psychological distance of the level of a feature in an object or situation and an internal standard of comparison in memory, such as the 'template' for a category or the 'norm' of recognition (Booth & Freeman, 1993). The JND-scaled distances from norm can be combined among observed and inferred psychophysical functions to generate diagnostics among hypothesised information-transforming (mental) processes mediating observed quantitative judgments (Richardson & Booth, 1993). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Just-noticeable difference」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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