Measuring visual discomfort - a novel two-step method for reducing criterion effects when measuring subjective responses

Clarke, ADF, O'Hare, L ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0331-3646 and Hibbard, PB, 2026. Measuring visual discomfort - a novel two-step method for reducing criterion effects when measuring subjective responses. Vision Research, 241: 108765. ISSN 0042-6989

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Abstract

Visual discomfort is a subjective experience, like many attributes of interest in the field of psychology. Measuring subjective phenomena can be difficult, as there is no ground truth against which to calibrate judgements. There is also a trade-off between the quality of the data and the time and effort of the participant — greater time investment should result in better data. However, whilst long, complex experiments might be possible in controlled lab settings with few observers, it becomes a barrier when attempting to estimate visual discomfort in less controlled but more ecologically valid spaces, and when investigating individual differences, for example young people and clinical populations. It is also difficult to calibrate judgements between participants due to individual variation in criterion — the idiosyncratic mapping of discomfort onto responses. We propose an intuitive method for participants to reduce criterion effects. This method maximises the amount of information gathered in a short space of time, and limits the risk of apparently estimating “discomfort” when the individual does not experience it. We apply this method to test two theoretical contributions to visual discomfort — cortical hyperexcitability (from spatial frequency (f), corresponding to stripe thickness) and ambiguous motion signals (from phase modulation wavelength (µ) corresponding to stripe waviness). Participants gave binary estimations that were used to scale their magnitude estimations. Using Bayesian methods, both these factors were found to affect discomfort judgements in both controlled lab environments (34 observers) and real-world estimations (47 observers).

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Vision Research
Creators:	Clarke, A.D.F., O'Hare, L. and Hibbard, P.B.
Publisher:	Elsevier
Date:	April 2026
Volume:	241
ISSN:	0042-6989
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1016/j.visres.2026.108765 DOI S0042698926000143 Publisher Item Identifier 2559464 Other
Rights:	© 2026 the authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	26 Jan 2026 11:38
Last Modified:	26 Jan 2026 18:15
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/55122

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