chapter 1: information and information-processing
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Chapter 1: Information and information-processing. Moving away from behaviorism. Latent learning idea of information pick-up and storage Place learning idea of information specifically about the environment (rather than the organism’s own movements) - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
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Chapter 1:Information and information-processing
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Moving away from behaviorismLatent learning idea of information pick-up and storage
Place learning idea of information specifically about the environment (rather than the organism’s own movements)
Language idea of hierarchical, rather than serial, organization [also emerges from Lashley’s analysis of behavior]
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Lashley on serial order
• Sequential organization is key to human and animal behavior
• Locomotion
• Planned behaviors
• Language
• Rejected idea that sequential organization is the result of associative chaining
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Types of evidence• Movement can occur even when sensory feedback is interrupted
• Some movement sequences are too quick for elements to be triggered by preceding elements
• Errors in behavior suggest high-level organization
• Context-sensitivity of behaviors [e.g. /rajt/ in “The mill-wright on my right thinks it right that some conventional rite should symbolize the right of every man to write as he pleases”]
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Basic motor plansGoal
Selection of effector
Trajectory of effector
Muscle coordination
Sensory feedback and fine-tuning
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Problems
• These plans obviously draw upon information about the body and about the environment. How is this information stored?
• How are the plans themselves “coded”?
• What sort of “processing” is involved in the execution of a plan?
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
The big picture Cognitive science grew out of these basic ideas
• organisms pick up and process information about the environment [distal, rather than proximal] • they make plans that exploit this information
Developing these ideas was made much easier by two mathematical theories
• the theory of information• the theory of computation
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Shannon on information
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Measuring information in bitsA bit is the quantity of information required to distinguish 2
equally likely (and incompatible) states of affairs• 1 bit of information is required to communicate the fact that a coin has
landed heads• 4 bits to communicate the winning ticket in a 16 ticket lottery
• Generally, when we have equally likely alternatives each with probability p, we require – log2(p) bits of information to identify which one holds
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Miller’s magical number 7Exploring the channel capacity of a perceiver (considered as a communication
channel)
Distinction between:
span of absolute judgment
span of immediate memory
Both are circumscribed by the number 7 - but in different ways.
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Span of absolute judgmentAbsolute judgments of unidimensional stimuli – e.g. categorizing
colors or identifying pitches of sounds
• as opposed to relative judgments (darker/lighter or higher/lower)
Subjects are systematically limited in the number of bits of information that they can process
• Limitation seems more or less constant across different sensory modalities
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Pollack on identifying tones
The auditory channel seems to be an information channel with a built-in information processing bottleneck – around 2.5 bits
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Overcoming the bottleneck Increasing the number of dimensions along which objects are compared
• discrimination gets cruder as number of dimensions increases
• distinctive features distinguishing phonemes are binary
• Making successive judgments in addition to simultaneous ones (as in language) – i.e. presenting a range of items successively and then asking the subject to make the identifications
• short-term memory
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
The span of absolute memory• The issue here is the number of items that can be
immediately recalled
• Index of number of items that can be stored in short-term memory
• This is not the same as the span of immediate judgment – not a test of categorization
• Known that here too we have a limit of 7, more or less
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
The Hayes experiments show that the span of absolute memory is not constrained by the amount of information carried by the items that are being recalled
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Chunking • Exploits the distinction between
• Constraints upon absolute judgments• Constraints upon short-term memory
• We can only hold 7 items in STM - but we can use chunking/recoding to hold far more than 7 bits of information
• Information is processed relative to a particular coding/format
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Information in information theory • The mathematical theory of communication
(1) Centred on concept of information channel
(2) Studies how messages are encoded into signals and then transmitted to a receiver
(3) Concerned primarily with information gain (defined probabilistically in terms of reduction of uncertainty)
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Cognitive Science José Luis Bermúdez / Cambridge University Press 2010
Information in cognitive science• Cognitive scientists are more concerned with how
information is transformed (processed) than with how it is transmitted
• Information understood in terms of representations
• Major concern is how information-processing is physically implemented in particular mental architectures