Could the configuring of features replace a specialised receptor ?

This paper illustrates how perception is achieved through interactions among the psychophysical functions of judged features of an object. The theory is that the perceiver places processed features in a multidimensional space of discriminal processes. Each dimension is scaled in units of discrimination performance. The zero coordinate of each feature is its level in an internal standard (norm) established by previous experience of that category of object in context. The experiments reported here show that one, two or three concurrent single-featured objects matched the multiple features of another object in two ways. Either stimulation from the two objects had discrimination distances from norm that added or the stimulation by one object was processed through a concept describing stimulation by the other object. It follows that, in this case, perception via a receptor for the multi-featured object can be replaced by a point of balance among receptors for each single feature. The object with its own receptor is the gustatory stimulant L-glutamic acid as its monosodium salt. The features that stimulate diverse gustatory receptors of their own are sodium chloride, citric acid, sucrose and caffeine. A more complex approach to dimensional coding was developed earlier for photoreceptors in colour judgments. The present approach is modality independent, mathematically simple and economical in experimental data. 3 Perception as interacting psychophysical functions. Introduction Perception is the successful performance of judgments on sensed and conceptualised features of objects and situations. A psychophysical function from stimulus to response represents the causal influence of the environmental feature on the perceptual judgment. When a single feature has exclusive control, the judgment is termed 'analytical.' When a judgment integrates information from two or more features, as in the recognition of an object, their analytical psychophysical functions must be interacting in some way. These interactions can be diagnosed from the raw data for each psychophysical function, using the parameters of its discriminal process (Thurstone 1927). The key step is to anchor all the judgments on a personal internal standard or norm which has been established by previous experience for the features of the object (Booth, Thompson & Shahedian 1983). Then the individual's perceptual processes during an experimental session can be modelled as multidimensional discrimination from that norm (Booth & Freeman 1993). This approach reconciles template and multiple-feature approaches It also spans the divide between sensory and semantic perception (Barsalou 2008; Medin & Barsalou 1987). We present here the first full …