Search results for "Temperature sensation"

Temperature sensation: the "3-bowls experiment" revisited.

1990

The "3-bowls experiment", usually attributed to E. H. Weber*, will be remembered by many from their first lab course in human physiology. The left and right hands are immersed for several minutes in bowls containing water at 10 and 40°C, respectively. When both hands are then placed in a third bowl of water at 27 °C, the left hand feels distinctly warm and the right hand distinctly cool. Until now nobody has been able to reconcile this apparent unreliability of the sense of temperature with the observation that humans regularly make judgements of the temperatures of objects; for example, mothers seldom use a thermometer to check the temperature of a baby's milk, but rather hold the bottle a…