Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/C003470/1
Title:	Non-Parametric Stimulus-Response Functions for Psychophysics
Principal Investigator:	Foster, Professor DH
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:	University of Glasgow
Department:	Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Organisation:	University of Manchester, The
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	14 November 2005	Ends:	13 May 2009	Value (£):	198,404
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Vision & Senses - ICT appl.
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Creative Industries
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
In studying sensory and behavioural responses to physical stimuli, it is often necessary to quantify the strength of a stimulus in terms of a subject's response. A typical procedure is to repeatedly present different levels of the stimulus and to record a particular response at each level. From these data, a psychometric function is estimated relating the level of the stimulus to the probability of a response, for example, the detection of a flash of light of a particular intensity. Since little may be known about the true psychometric function, the experimentalist is often faced with attempting to fit an ad-hoc curve to the data, with the accompanying risk of obtaining biased or unreliable threshold estimates. This applications-oriented project aims to provide a simple, flexible procedure for estimating psychometric functions and deriving thresholds from them, with minimum assumptions. The approach is based on locally weighted polynomial regression. This technique cannot, however, be applied automatically to the problem of estimating psychometric functions, and the project will be devoted to determining the critical computational components, testing the validity of the approach against a large corpus of real data as well as in simulations, and delivering user-friendly and accessible software for those working in vision, audition, and behavioural research more generally.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Further Information:
Organisation Website:	http://www.man.ac.uk