PSYC 213 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Air Traffic Control, Information Theory, Cognitive Psychology
8 Sep 2016
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Key words : folk psychology = an umbrella term for various assumptions and theories based on everyday behaviour of ourselves and others, bit = short for binary digit ; the most basic unit of information. The amount of information a message conveys is an increasing function of the number of possible messages from which that particular message could have been selected. The less likely it is, the more information it conveys: early tests of information theory. Hyman (1953) : 1st condition : asked participants to make an appropriate verbal response to a varying number of lights. Results: increasing the number of equally probably alternatives from one to eight produced an increase in response time: 2nd condition : hyman made the occurrence of some signals more frequent that that of others. Thus, it takes longer to react to an improbable stimulus (which conveys more information) than to a probable one (which conveys less information: limitations on information-processing.
