Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 69, Issue 3, 1 January 1999, Pages B17-B24
Cognition

Brief article
Scale-invariance as a unifying psychological principle

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00066-3Get rights and content

Abstract

How can the classical psychological laws be explained and unified? It is proposed here that scale-invariance is a unifying principle. Distributions of many environmental magnitudes are observed to be scale invariant; that is, the statistical structure of the world remains the same at different measurement scales [Mandelbrot, B., 1982. The Fractal Geometry of Nature (2nd Edn.). W.H. Freeman, San Francisco, CA; Bak, P., 1997. How Nature Works: The Science of Self-organized Criticality. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK]. We hypothesise that the perceptual-motor system reflects and preserves these scale invariances. This allows derivation of several of the most widely applicable psychological laws governing perception and action across domains and species (Weber's, Stevens', Fitts' and Piéron's Laws). We suggest that these fundamental laws reflect accommodation of the perceptuo-motor system to the scale-invariant physical world and therefore have a common foundation.

Section snippets

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK (R000236216), and from the Leverhulme Trust (7048PSA), and while Nick Chater was a Senior Research Fellow at British Telecom (UK).

References (29)

  • Anderson, J.R., 1990. The Adaptive Character of Thought. Erlbaum, Hillsdale,...
  • Bak, P., 1997. How Nature Works: The Science of Self-organized Criticality. Oxford University Press, Oxford,...
  • Fechner, G.T., 1860. Elemente der Psychopysik. Breitkopf and...
  • D.J. Field

    Relations between the statistics of natural images and the response properties of cortical cells

    Journal of the Optical Society of America

    (1987)
  • P.M. Fitts

    The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement

    Journal of Experimental Psychology

    (1954)
  • R. Garcia-Pelaya et al.

    Scaling laws for pulsar glitches

    Europhysics Letters

    (1993)
  • Garner, W.R., 1962. Uncertainty and Structure as Psychological Concepts. Wiley, New...
  • Geldard, F.A., 1972. The Human Senses. Wiley, New...
  • J. Gibbon

    Scalar expectancy theory and Weber's Law in animal timing

    Psychological Review

    (1977)
  • D.M. Green

    Additivity of masking

    Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

    (1967)
  • D.M. Green et al.

    Effect of background noise on auditory detection of noise bursts

    Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

    (1962)
  • J.P. Guilford

    A generalized psychophysical law

    Psychological Review

    (1932)
  • Gutenberg, B., Richter, C.F., 1949. Seismicity of the Earth. Princeton University Press, Princeton,...
  • C.M. Harris et al.

    Signal-dependent noise determines motor planning

    Nature

    (1998)
  • Cited by (74)

    • Biased confabulation in risky choice

      2022, Cognition
      Citation Excerpt :

      In prominent models of memory and decision-making the samples used to predict an upcoming choice represent distinct episodes of past experience and are more aligned with the item-specific representation outlined above (Gonzalez et al., 2003). For example, MINERVA-DM relies on a “database” of memories that are degraded representations of experienced events (e.g., due to lack of attention at encoding) (Dougherty, Gettys, & Ogden, 1999), whereas Decision-by-Sampling (DbS) (Stewart, Chater, & Brown, 2006) assumes that the contents of memory reflect the structure of the world (Chater & Brown, 1999; Stewart, 2009). Exemplar models assume that each item is stored in a unique memory trace (Nosofsky, 1988) and have been used to predict choice in decisions-from-experience paradigms (Hotaling, Donkin, Jarvstad, & Newell, 2022).

    • Working memory development: A 50-year assessment of research and underlying theories

      2022, Cognition
      Citation Excerpt :

      This finding does not exclude the reality of principles put forward by verbal learning researchers, such as proactive and retroactive interference, but it suggests that we need further divisions of the memory system to understand all the evidence. There must be something in the mind and brain other than a single, all-encompassing neural network for memory that operates according to just one set of rules for memory at any time scale, as the unitary memory theorists from an empiricist approach seem to believe (e.g., Chater & Brown, 1999; Nairne, 2002). Working memory, by definition, can hold a limited amount.

    • The learnability consequences of Zipfian distributions in language

      2022, Cognition
      Citation Excerpt :

      There are many different explanations for the origin of Zipfian distributions in language, with ongoing controversy about the significance of this law and whether it tells us something fundamental about language. On the one hand, such distributions are found across the physical world, where they are thought to reflect general mathematical principles not unique to language (e.g., scale-invariance, Chater & Brown, 1999). However, their recurrence in language - a human creation - may nevertheless reflect foundational properties of human cognition and communication.

    • A random multiplicative model of Piéron's law and choice reaction times

      2021, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
    • Fold-change detection in biological systems

      2018, Current Opinion in Systems Biology
      Citation Excerpt :

      Mapping FCD designs will enable us to understand which functional context a design tends to appear in (e.g. feedback in chemotaxis, feedforward in cell signaling). One fascinating context to search for FCD is in psychology-many human and animal behaviors show exact adaptation and invariance to input scale [52–57], and neuronal systems often adapt and scale their activity as well [58]. This hints that FCD might appear in psychology, providing strong constraints on the circuits at play.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text