Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Research FocusThe neural basis of the Weber–Fechner law: a logarithmic mental number line
Section snippets
Mental scaling: linear, logarithmic, or power function?
The ‘scaling problem’ was integral to the birth of psychology as a scientific discipline. Founding fathers of experimental psychology, inlcuding Weber and Fechner considered as one of their central goals the mathematical description of how a continuum of sensation, such as loudness or duration, is represented in the mind. By careful psychophysical experiments, often requiring thousands of discrimination trials on pairs of stimuli, they identified basic regularities of our psychological
The neuronal code for number
The ability to record from neurons that are assumed to constitute the neural basis of the psychological number scale now brings direct physiological evidence to bear on this issue. In the early days of neurophysiology, a few neurons that encoded number were reported in the association cortex of the cat [9], although this initial discovery was quickly forgotten. In 2002, however, two papers, one recording in parietal cortex and the other in prefrontal cortex, reported the observation of neurons
Future prospects
The monkey data of Nieder and Miller are just a first stab at the problem from the neurophysiological standpoint, and do not fully resolve the Fechner–Weber–Stevens debate yet. When Nieder and Miller fitted their data with a power function, they obtained only a slightly worse fit than that with the logarithmic scale. To discriminate the power and the logarithmic functions in future experiments, it will be important to increase the range of numbers tested. We know from behavioral paradigms that,
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