Their approach eventually led to Hick’s Law, one of the few laws of experimental psychology. And sure enough, no sooner had Claude Shannon published his theory of information in the 1940s, than psychologists began to apply it to the exchange of information between the environment and the brain that goes on during reaction-time experiments. This information-centric approach is clearly ripe for an information-theoretic treatment. This kind of experiment is called a visual lexical decision task. The thinking is that information processing takes time, so the average amount of time taken to begin or complete a task reflects the duration of the cognitive processes involved in it.įor example, a typical reaction-time experiment might ask a subject to classify a sequence of letters as a word or a nonword, by pressing a button. For more than a century, psychologists have used reaction time as a window into the brain.
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