The psychometric function's slope provides information about the reliability of psychophysical threshold estimates. Furthermore, knowing the slope allows one to compare, across studies, thresholds that were obtained at different performance criterion levels. Unfortunately, the empirical validation of psychometric function slope estimates is hindered by the bewildering variety of slope measures ...

Infrared observations of seaborne thermal sources are subject to the effects of atmospheric refraction. For low elevation angles at long ranges, out to the limit of visibility, the inevitable atmospheric temperature gradients frequently produce mirages. I present an analysis of a 22-min sequence of images recorded on 18 February 1994 at the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center at Wallops Island, V...

Recently, Myerson, Adams, Hale, and Jenkins (2003) replied to arguments advanced by Ratcliff, Spieler, and McKoon (2000) about interpretations of Brinley functions. Myerson et al. (2003) focused on methodological and terminological issues, arguing that (1) Brinley functions are not quantile-quantile (QQ) plots of distributions of mean reaction times (RTs) across conditions; that the fact that t...

In the study of nonspecific preparation, the response time (RT) to an imperative stimulus is analyzed as a function of the foreperiod (FP), the interval between a warning stimulus and the imperative stimulus. When FP is varied within blocks of trials, a downward sloping FP-RT function is usually observed. The slope of this function depends on the distribution of FPs (the more negative the skewn...

Wolfe (2016) responds to my article (Kristjánsson, 2015), arguing among other things, that the differences in slope by response method in my data reflect speed accuracy trade-offs. But when reaction times and errors are combined in one score (inverse efficiency) to sidestep speed accuracy trade-offs, slope differences still remain. The problem that slopes, which are thought to measure search sp...

Research indicates that, when the first and second formants of a vowel are separated by less than about 3.5 Bark, perception of its height and some other aspects of its quality is determined by some weighted average of the low-frequency spectrum, rather than by particular harmonic or hypothetical formant frequencies (as is the case with more widely spaced formants). This spectral averaging has ...

This paper examines the thesis that monopsony power is an important determinant of wages in nursing labor markets. Using data from the 1985-93 Current Population Surveys, measures of relative nurse/non-nurse wage rates for 252 labor markets are constructed. Contrary to predictions from the monopsony model, no positive relationship exists between relative nursing wages and hospital density or ma...

Thresholds for chromatic differences were measured in a simple visual search task in which the target differed from the distractors in chromaticity only. In Experiment 1, the spatial separation between stimulus elements was varied. Slopes of threshold versus set-size (2-16) for elements in close proximity were somewhat elevated, suggesting non-independence of the stimulus elements. In Experimen...