Psychophysics
Measuring perception, action, and user experience
Psychophysics provides the measurement backbone of the research programme. It is used to quantify what people perceive, how reliably they can discriminate sensory signals, how their judgments change with context, and how experimental apparatus affects the signals that reach the observer.
The methods include thresholds, just-noticeable differences, points of subjective equality, psychometric functions, reaction-time analysis, duration judgments, temporal-order judgments, forced-choice tasks, user evaluations, and studies of adaptation and recalibration. These tools make it possible to connect behaviour to the physical properties of stimuli and to the design constraints of devices.
Psychophysics is also central to translation. Whether the goal is a wearable haptic system, a VR hand-tracking method, an XR interaction technique, a music rehearsal platform, or a tactile ageing study, behavioural measurement provides the evidence needed to decide what works, what fails, and what people actually perceive.
Key Questions
What can people detect, discriminate, judge, or act on under controlled sensory conditions?
Which psychophysical methods best estimate thresholds, bias, uncertainty, and response reliability?
How do apparatus, timing, task design, and user experience affect perceptual measurements?
How can behavioural evidence guide haptic, XR, multisensory, and modelling research?
Related Keywords
Portfolio and Resources
TIMELY tutorial and psychometric fitting scripts
Methods and tutorial material for comparing psychometric fitting procedures and temporal sensitivity measures.
Spearman-Karber and WAVE method scripts
Reproducible scripts for psychophysical threshold estimation and timing analysis.
Aging Touch website
Public research resource on tactile perception, ageing, and surface texture perception, linked to BBSRC-supported work.
Tactile iPhone experiment
Mobile tactile perception experiment translating multisensory texture research into an accessible public app.
VR delay measurement code
Software supporting reproducible measurement of end-to-end latency in virtual reality systems, linked to work on timing accuracy in psychophysical and XR experiments.
Arduino Lazy Susan
Archived remote-research demonstrator for shipping robotic stimuli and supporting sensory experiments at a distance.Featured Publications
(2020).
Contact forces in roughness discrimination.
Scientific Reports.
(2020).
The Predictive Perception of Dynamic Vibrotactile Stimuli Applied to the Fingertip.
2020 IEEE Haptics Symposium (HAPTICS).
(2020).
Static weight perception through skin stretch and kinesthetic information: detection thresholds, JNDs, and PSEs.
IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
Articles in psychophysics 25
(2020).
Contact forces in roughness discrimination.
Scientific Reports.
(2020).
The Predictive Perception of Dynamic Vibrotactile Stimuli Applied to the Fingertip.
2020 IEEE Haptics Symposium (HAPTICS).
(2020).
Static weight perception through skin stretch and kinesthetic information: detection thresholds, JNDs, and PSEs.
IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
(2019).
Perceptual Limits of Visual-Haptic Simultaneity in Virtual Reality Interactions.
2019 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC).
(2019).
The contributions of skin stretch and kinesthetic information to static weight perception.
2019 IEEE World Haptics Conference, WHC 2019.
(2019).
The frequency of tactile adaptation systematically biases subsequent frequency identification.
2019 IEEE World Haptics Conference, WHC 2019.
(2018).
Modality-specific temporal constraints for state-dependent interval timing.
Scientific Reports.
(2018).
Timing and Time Perception: Procedures, Measures, & Applications.
BRILL.
(2018).
Assessing Duration Discrimination: Psychophysical Methods and Psychometric Function Analysis.
Timing and Time Perception: Procedures, Measures, & Applications.
(2016).
Optimal Perceived Timing: Integrating Sensory Information with Dynamically Updated Expectations.
Scientific Reports.
(2016).
Temporal Regularity of the Environment Drives Time Perception.
PLOS ONE.
(2016).
For the Last Time: Temporal Sensitivity and Perceived Timing of the Final Stimulus in an Isochronous Sequence.
Timing and Time Perception.
(2015).
Timing Rhythms: Perceived Duration Increases with a Predictable Temporal Structure of Short Interval Fillers.
Plos One.
(2015).
Speed/accuracy tradeoff in force perception.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
(2014).
Multisensory Softness.
Springer London.
(2014).
Perceived Softness of Composite Objects.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics).
(2014).
Response time-dependent force perception during hand movement.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics).
(2012).
Exploratory reach-to-grasp trajectories for uncertain object poses.
Workshop on Beyond Robotic Grasping (IROS).
(2011).
Effects of visual-haptic asynchronies and loading-unloading movements on compliance perception.
Brain Research Bulletin.
(2011).
The rubber hand illusion: Feeling of ownership and proprioceptive drift Do not go hand in hand.
PLoS ONE.
(2010).
Learning to use an invisible visual signal for perception.
Current Biology.
(2010).
User-based evaluation of data-driven haptic rendering.
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception.
(2009).
Recalibration of multisensory simultaneity: Cross-modal transfer coincides with a change in perceptual latency.
Journal of Vision.
(2002).
Illusory 3-D rotation induced by dynamic image shading.
Perception and Psychophysics.
Related Research Areas
Haptics
Touch, force feedback, and tactile interaction
Temporal Perception
Synchrony, duration, recalibration, and timing in interactive systems
Multisensory Perception
How the brain combines uncertain signals during perception and action
Computational Modelling
Formal models of perception, timing, movement, and interaction
Massimiliano Di Luca
Associate Professor in Psychology and Computer Science
Associate Professor in Psychology and Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, leading interdisciplinary research in multisensory perception, extended reality, haptics, and computational cognitive science.