Question

Imagine you are tasting bowls of soup for a chef who is working on a soup recipe, and she wants the soup to have a subtle hint of black pepper flavor. In her first batch of soup, you could not detect any pepper flavor. If she cooks several more batches of soup and keeps increasing the amount of black pepper in every batch until you finally notice the black pepper flavor, which psychophysical method is she employing?

Answer 1

Answer: Method of constant stimuli

Explanation: The chef is employing psychophysical method of constant stimuli.

Constant stimuli is one of the three psychophysical method, it depicts the sensory threshold by randomly presenting varying degrees of stimuli believed to have close proximity to the desired threshold.

Thus, in the chef scenario, her desired threshold was a subtle hint of black pepper flavor in a soup. Then, she continue to increase the amount of black pepper (i.e random presentation of stimuli) in her batches of soup, until she established a close proximity to her desired threshold (a subtle hint of black pepper flavor in a soup).