Complexity,information and time

Evolution proceeds in time. Time is experienced as change only, predominantly irreversible change. Measuring change in the form of information growth it is possible to define a measure for the amount of time produced during information increase. Systems creating information contribute to the generation of time. To be able to create information, a system has to be highly complex. The more complex a system is, the more it can contribute to generation of time. The rate of time generation is determined by the capability of the system to gain information. Complexity, information accumulation, and time generation are therefore synonyms.     

Coordinating cognitive information: task effects and individual differences in integrating information from several sources.

In many tasks people have to coordinate the information from several sources. An example would be driving a car while listening to directions. The driver has to establish a correspondence between a visual picture and verbal instructions. This paper addresses two questions concerning information coordination. Is there an ability to coordinate information received from several sources that is different from the ability to deal with information from each source, alone? Does coordination simply involve allocating resources to deal with the component tasks, or does the act of coordination itself constitute a separate task? Four experiments examined the coordination of a verbal component task with a visual-spatial and with an auditory component task. The results showed that the ability to coordinate perceptual and verbal information is separate from the ability to deal with either perceptual or verbal information, alone. A simple resource sharing model was not adequate in explaining how coordination occurred. We relate our results to a model in which perceptual reasoning occurs independently of verbal processing, but transforming perceptual information into a propositional form is affected by concurrent verbal processing.     

Accentuation of information processes and biases in group judgments integrating base-rate and case-specific information

This article investigates differences in the ways that groups and individuals apply information-processing strategies and fall prey to biases in their judgments. Judgments were made on probabilistic inference problems that involved base-rate and case-specific information. Consistent with hypotheses, when individuals neglect base-rate information in their probability judgments, groups accentuate this tendency. Moreover, when the source of case-specific information is inaccurate, individuals neglect the case-specific information, and groups accentuate this tendency with the base-rate information dominating their probability judgments. In addition, groups accentuate the strategies used by individuals to integrate the base-rate and case-specific information. These results provide strong support for a group accentuation tendency for the application of information-processing biases and the strategies used to integrate information. Discussion reflects upon the relationship of the results of this experiment with other research on base-rate neglect and group judgment. Underlying mechanisms and potential moderators of the group accentuation pattern are also discussed.     

Learning where to look for danger: integrating affective and spatial information

Although not previously addressed by researchers of spatial cognition or affect, the combination of spatial and affective information is essential for many approach and avoidance behaviors, and thus for survival. We provide the first evidence that through incidental experience, people form representations that capture correlations between affective and spatial information. Participants were able to do so even when the correlation was weak, they were not told to look for the correlation, and the stimuli varied on multiple other dimensions besides valence. In addition, people were more sensitive to the presented correlation when stimuli were negative than when they were positive. This asymmetry in representation may stem from underlying differences in the activation functions for positive and negative hedonic information processing.     

Limits on integrating motion information across saccades

In two experiments, we investigated whether people could detect changes in the rotary motion of a cube. A rendering of a cube rotating at a constant angular velocity was presented on a video monitor and, at a key point in the trial, a cross was presented to one side of the cube as a cue for a saccade. On some trials, a change in the rotation occurred either about 100 msec before the saccade or during the saccade; on other trials, there was no change. The change consisted of moving the cube to a new position in the "rotation sequence," after which it continued to rotate at the same angular velocity as before. There was also a control on all trials to ensure that change detection was not due to the detection of low-level motion. Although detection of the change was well above chance when it occurred during the fixation, it was at chance when it occurred during the saccade, except in the case of one participant (who was in both experiments). This chance performance also occurred in Experiment 2 for (1) a slower rotation speed and (2) an axis of rotation that made the rotation planar. The participant who had above chance performance (and as good as that when the change occurred during a fixation) reported using a "strategy" that did not track the path of the cube. It thus appears that there is no natural way in which the visualsystem tracks this rotary motion, and that detection of change requires some sort of recoding. This finding raises the question of whether good performance in other, apparently similar, motion-detection tasks is a result of similar recoding.     

Storage and processing constraints on integrating story information in children and adults

In two experiments, this study examined the effects of integration complexity on the ability of child and adult listeners to integrate information from different sentences in a story. First and third graders and college adults were read stories containing incongruent event information and succeeding resolution information that explained the incongruency, and asked questions that probed incongruency recognition and resolution. Information storage complexity was manipulated by separating the event and resolution information and foregrounding or backgrounding the focal story characters. Processing complexity was manipulated by varying the inferential complexity of relating the resolution to the incongruent information, and the coreferential cues linking the event and resolution information. The results showed that increases in complexity adversely affected resolution integration, and more for the children than for the adults. The children's integration performance, in particular, was affected by theme discontinuity and coreferential complexity.     

Integrating information from two pictorial animations: Complexity and cognitive prerequisites influence performance

Dividing visual attention between spatially distinct sources of information could either be beneficial (if there is too much information for a single visualization) or detrimental (if interrelated information has to be mentally re‐integrated) for learning. We present a new display technology allowing for the presentation of two distinct animations by avoiding split foci of visual attention: learners are able to switch between animations by moving their head. We examined how 84 naïve learners integrated information in three presentation modes: the ‘vexing‐image’ mode displaying two animations, participants being able to switch between them without shifting the visual focus, a classical ‘split‐screen’ and an ‘overlaid’ condition. Results showed that reduced complexity led to higher performance. Further, we showed that participants with high mental rotation abilities were best in the ‘split‐screen’ mode, whereas participants with low mental rotation abilities benefited most from the ‘vexing‐image’. Theoretical and instructional consequences of these findings are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Inhibition of return and the attentional set for integrating versus differentiating information.

Cuing a location with an uninformative cue leads to a facilitatory effect at that location shortly afterward and later (about 300 ms) to a negative effect called inhibition of return (IOR). Until recently, it was argued that IOR occurs in detection and localization tasks, but not in discrimination tasks. However, the authors of several recent studies have demonstrated IOR effects in discrimination tasks, although at a later cue-to-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). In this study, the authors examined why IOR occurs at a later SOA in discrimination tasks. In Experiments 1 and 2, different time courses of exogenous cuing effects in detection and discrimination tasks were established. In Experiment 3, the authors examined the role of an attentional set on the time course of exogenous cuing effects by manipulating the proportion of trials in which a distractor is presented in the location opposite the target. A new framework for understanding exogenous cuing effects and their dependence on endogenous attention is proposed.     

Forgiveness results from integrating information about relationship value and exploitation risk

Exploitation is a fact of life for social organisms, and natural selection gives rise to revenge mechanisms that are designed to deter such exploitations. However, humans may also possess cognitive forgiveness mechanisms designed to promote the restoration of valuable social relationships following exploitation. In the current article, the authors test the hypothesis that decisions about forgiveness result from a computational system that combines information about relationship value and exploitation risk to produce decisions about whom to forgive following interpersonal offenses. The authors examined the independent and interactive effects of relationship value and exploitation risk across two studies. In Study 1, controlling for other constructs related to forgiveness, the authors assessed relationship value and exploitation risk. In Study 2, participants experienced experimental manipulations of relationship value and exploitation risk. Across studies, using hypothetical and actual offenses and varied forgiveness measures, the combination of low exploitation risk and high relationship value predicted the greatest forgiveness.     

Deterministic Chaos and Computational Complexity: the Case of Methodological Complexity Reductions

Some problems rarely discussed in traditional philosophy of science are mentioned: The empirical sciences using mathematico-quantitative theoretical models are frequently confronted with several types of computational problems posing primarily methodological limitations on explanatory and prognostic matters. Such limitations may arise from the appearances of deterministic chaos and (too) high computational complexity in general. In many cases, however, scientists circumvent such limitations by utilizing reductional approximations or complexity reductions for intractable problem formulations, thus constructing new models which are computationally tractable. Such activities are compared with reduction types (more) established in philosophy of science. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Capacity limits of information processing in the brain

Despite the impressive complexity and processing power of the human brain, it is severely capacity limited. Behavioral research has highlighted three major bottlenecks of information processing that can cripple our ability to consciously perceive, hold in mind, and act upon the visual world, illustrated by the attentional blink (AB), visual short-term memory (VSTM), and psychological refractory period (PRP) phenomena, respectively. A review of the neurobiological literature suggests that the capacity limit of VSTM storage is primarily localized to the posterior parietal and occipital cortex, whereas the AB and PRP are associated with partly overlapping fronto-parietal networks. The convergence of these two networks in the lateral frontal cortex points to this brain region as a putative neural locus of a common processing bottleneck for perception and action.     

Phonological codes are used in integrating information across saccades in word identification and reading.

A major issue in reading is the extent to which phonological information is used in visual word perception. The present experiments demonstrated that phonological information acquired on 1 fixation from a word in the parafovea is used to help identify that word when it is later fixated. A homophone of a target word, when presented as a preview in the parafovea, facilitated processing of the target word seen on the next fixation more than a preview of a word matched with the homophone in visual similarity to the target word. This facilitation was observed both in the time to name an isolated target word and in the fixation time on the target word while silently reading a sentence; the preview was virtually never consciously identified in either task. Because the visual similarity of the preview to the target also plays a part in the facilitative effect on the preview, however, codes other than phonological codes are preserved across saccades.     

关于"复杂性研究"和"复杂性科学"

我赞成“复杂性研究”却不赞成“复杂性科学”。道理很简单 :“复杂性研究”是可能的 ,“复杂性科学”是不可能的。在系统科学中 ,如果我们把“复杂性”定义为“复杂系统的动力学特征” ,那么我们当然并且也应当设法对这种特征加以界定、描述、分析。例如 ,我手边有一本武汉大学哲学系赵凯荣的博士论文《复杂性 :人类认识之迷》。作者指出“复杂性是通过系统而且是复杂系统定义的。它是一个系统概念且是一个复杂系统概念 ,它具有结构 ,也具有层次” ,[1] 但尽管这样 ,作者仍然把复杂性划分为系统复杂性、非线性复杂性、自组织复杂性、内时空…     

Voluntary timing and brain function: an information processing approach.

This article takes an information processing perspective to review current understanding of brain mechanisms of human voluntary timing. Theoretical accounts of timing of the production of isochronous tapping and rhythms and of bimanual responding repetitive responding are reviewed. The mapping of higher level temporal parameter setting and memory processes and of lower level motor implementation process onto cortical and subcortical brain structures is discussed in relation to evidence from selective lesions in a range of neurological motor disorders. Brain activation studies that have helped identify key brain structures involved in the control of timing are reviewed.     

Semantic codes are not used in integrating information across eye fixations in reading: Evidence from fluent Spanish-English bilinguals

The question of whether meaning can be extracted from unidentified parafoveal words was examined using fluent Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, subjects fixated on a central cross, and a preview word was presented to the right of fixation in parafoveal vision. During the saccade to the parafoveal preview word, the preview was replaced by the target word, which the subject was required to name. In Experiment 2, subjects read sentences containing the target word, and, as in the naming task, a preview word was replaced by the target word when the subject’s saccade crossed a boundary location. In both experiments, preview words were identical to the target word, translations, orthographic controls for the translations, or unrelated words in the opposite language. In both experiments, the preview benefit from the translation conditions was no greater than would be predicted by the orthographic similarity of the preview to the target. Hence, the data indicated that subjects obtained no useful semantic information from words seen parafoveally that enabled them to identify them more quickly on the subsequent fixation.     

The role of phonological codes in integrating information across saccadic eye movements in Chinese character identification

Prior research has generally assumed either that phonological codes do not contribute to Chinese character identification or that they do so only through a look-up process at the character level. In 3 experiments, a homophone seen parafoveally aided the identification of a target character that was fixated following an eye movement to the preview location. Moreover, high-frequency phonetically regular characters were named faster than high-frequency, phonetically irregular characters. Thus, both lexical and sublexical phonological codes of Chinese characters are involved early in the process of character identification. Orthographic information from the preview was also used in character identification, as orthographically similar previews facilitated target identification as well. The evidence for the extraction of semantic information from parafoveal previews was mixed, as synonym previews facilitated in Experiment 2 but not in Experiment 1.     

Pleasure and Complexity: Berlyne Revisited

D. E. Berlyne (1960, 1974) posited an increasing linear function for complexity with an inverted U-shaped function for pleasure. Berlyne's theory of aesthetic response was tested through the presentation of 6 color reproductions of paintings to 92 participants and the gauging of their responses. When participants' pleasure was compared with interest, that hypothesis was upheld. However, when complexity was compared with pleasure, Berlyne's theory was not supported.     

On the transmission of partial information: inferences from movement-related brain potentials.

Results are reported from a new paradigm that uses movement-related brain potentials to detect response preparation based on partial information. The paradigm uses a hybrid choice-reaction go/nogo procedure in which decisions about response hand and whether to respond are based on separate stimulus attributes. A lateral asymmetry in the movement-related brain potential was found on nogo trials without overt movement. The direction of this asymmetry depended primarily on the signaled response hand rather than on properties of the stimulus. When the asymmetry first appeared was influenced by the time required to select the signaled hand, and when it began to differ on go and nogo trials was influenced by the time to decide whether to respond. These findings indicate that both stimulus attributes were processed in parallel and that the asymmetry reflected preparation of the response hand that began before the go/nogo decision was completed.