PSYB57H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1 Introduction: Air Traffic Controller, Channel Capacity, Neuropsychology
Document Summary
Cognition the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. The world contains information that is available for humans to process. Humans are active selectors of information from the environment. Only some of the information is selected for processing and responded to. Bit: the most basic unit of information, every event that occurs in a situation with two equally likely outcomes provides one bit of information. The amount of information provided by a given event is quantified in terms of bits. 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. Information theory: the information provided by a particular message is inversely related to the probability of its occurrence: the less likely it is, the more information it conveys. Limits to the nervous system"s capacity for information processing.
