The Weber-Fechner law, which describes the relationship between physical and perceived stimulus intensity, had appeared in Gustav Fechner's groundbreaking work "Elements of Psychophysics" in 1860. While the idea of a lawful relationship between physical objects and perceived stimuli had been widely accepted, the experimental methods for obtaining measurements and the possibility of a mathematically precise treatment of subjective perceptions were the subject of extended scientific debate. Müller's postdoctoral dissertation, "On the Foundations of Psychophysics" (1878), and his paper on the method of right and wrong cases (later known as the method of constant stimuli) established Müller as an independent, critical thinker. His contributions were acknowledged in Fechner's "Revision of the Main Points of Psychophysics." His methods still are widely used in psychophysical experiments.
Visual Perception
Visual perception, especially color perception, occupied Müller in the late 1890s and led to his authoring four publications on this topic between 1896 and 1897. In these papers he argued that the three photochemical substances proposed by Ewald Hering as the basis of color vision were reversible by a chemical rather than a metabolic process. Moreover, he proposed that equal excitation by red/green, blue/yellow, and black/white resulted in the perception of "cortical gray" rather than the visual "silence" assumed by Hering.
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