Topic: stimulus dimensions

Animals, including humans, learn to discriminate between the diverse sensory stimuli in their environments and to generalize their behaviors to new instances of those stimulus types. For example, rain can sound dramatically different as it falls on different surfaces and yet we have no problem classifying it as rain and discriminating it from speech. While we have some understanding of how generalization is done along a single stimulus dimension, such as sound frequency or light wavelength, natural stimuli are identifiable by a combination of dimensions. To understand perception, measuring the