How animals discriminate between stimulus magnitudes: a meta-analysis.

ABSTRACT: To maximize their fitness, animals must often discriminate between stimuli differing in magnitude (such as size, intensity, or number). Weber's Law of proportional processing states that stimuli are compared based on the proportional difference in magnitude, rather than the absolute difference. Weber's Law implies that when stimulus magnitudes are higher, it becomes harder to discriminate small differences between stimuli, leading to more discrimination errors. More generally, we can refer to a correlation between stimulus magnitude and discrimination error frequency as a magnitude effect, with Weber's law being a special case of the magnitude effect. However, the strength and prevalence of the magnitude effect across species have never previously been examined. Here, we conducted a meta-a

SUBMITTER: Worsley MZ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12059214 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May-Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature