Psychophysical laws revealed by electric hearing

PSYCHOPHYSICAL laws relate the intensity of a physical stimulus to its perceived magnitude. G.T. Fechner hypothesized 150 years ago that the psychophysical law can be derived by measuring intensity discrimination, but modern scientists favor a direct magnitude estimation approach and are still divided on whether and how intensity discrimination is related to sensation magnitude. This controversy is partially due to the uncertainty of the role of the sensory organ in the psychophysical law. Here we bypass the auditory sensory organ with electric stimulation of the human auditory nerve and find a close coupling between intensity discrimination and loudness functions in electric hearing. Our results support Fechner's hypothesis in principle but not the exact relationship from which he derived his logarithmic law. NeuroReport 10:1931-1935 (C) 1999 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.