Interaction,information and meaning

The possibility of a “unified theory of information” which avoids reifying information or attributing agency to it is explored using the patterned processes characteristic of self‐organization. Interactions are shown to create information from the level of quantum physics to human societies. The difference between meaningless and meaningful information is explained through the contextualizing role of systems.     

Shell games,information, and counterfactuals

Cohen and Meskin 2006 Cohen, Jonathan and Aaron, Meskin. 2006. An Objective Counterfactual Theory of Information. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 84: 333–352. [Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] have recently proposed a novel counterfactual account of information. I argue that it is a step down from its intended target, namely Dretske's 1981 Dretske, Fred. 1981. Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press.  [Google Scholar] theory of information. Thinking of the information carried by signals in terms of counterfactuals leads to falsely diagnosing bona fide instances of information transmission as not being instances of information transmission at all, with major loss of explanatory power.     

Fechner, information, and shape perception

How do retinal images lead to perceived environmental objects? Vision involves a series of spatial and material transformations—from environmental objects to retinal images, to neurophysiological patterns, and finally to perceptual experience and action. A rationale for understanding functional relations among these physically different systems occurred to Gustav Fechner: Differences in sensation correspond to differences in physical stimulation. The concept of information is similar: Relationships in one system may correspond to, and thus represent, those in another. Criteria for identifying and evaluating information include (a)?resolution, or the precision of correspondence; (b)?uncertainty about which input (output) produced a given output (input); and (c)?invariance, or the preservation of correspondence under transformations of input and output. We apply this framework to psychophysical evidence to identify visual information for perceiving surfaces. The elementary spatial structure shared by objects and images is the second-order differential structure of local surface shape. Experiments have shown that human vision is directly sensitive to this higher-order spatial information from interimage disparities (stereopsis and motion parallax), boundary contours, texture, shading, and combined variables. Psychophysical evidence contradicts other common ideas about retinal information for spatial vision and object perception.     

Aesthetics,information and meaning

Aesthetics has been defined relative to objective and subjective values; its historical and cultural world views are referenced. The author's view of beauty as communication is also introduced, where chance and necessity, the two antithetical realities produce the informa‐tion processes of modern time. That is, “difference” is associated with chance, the irrational, the spontaneous and the individual aspect of reality as opposed to necessity, the rational, the formal, and the universal aspects of things. Information is introduced as, the origin, as well as essence, of life. It is what produces information and is the only agent which produces both matter and psyche. Order and disorder, and the laws of “opposites” are considered building blocks of identity and difference and information. Information and Communication as an interconnecting agent are also considered a bridge between Eastern and Western philosophy, i.e., in its deconstruction of the particular into a web or field of energies in the West, and in Eastern thought in its becoming one with Nirvana or Brahman, the Sufi or the Tao, the ultimate one and all. Because goodness and truth under the influence of reason and science had failed, Eastern philosophy as an alternative to Western models is recommended. It is suggested that all that is left objectively is beauty, thus reason as basic is giving way to rules of beauty. And its principles are capable of describing man's evolution and his culture, as well as his aesthetic experience, which is nothing but information processes and communication. In conclusion, design as aesthetic communication is introduced as a model to reflect the above principles.     

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.     

Interaction of visual information,verbal information,and linguistic competence in the preschool-aged child

Carol Chomsky found evidence to support the notion that children have not mastered the syntactic form of the sentence John is easy to see until after the age of 8 years. However, she failed to control for the effects the visual stimulus might have had on the child's understanding of the stimulus question. This study reexamined Chomsky's conclusions by using two experimental conditions. The first condition was an exact replication of Chomsky's method, while the second included a control for the biasing effects produced by the visual stimulus. The results confirmed the authors' suspicions that the visual stimulus was indeed distorting Chomsky's findings and that, on the average, children were able to decode this particular syntactic form by the age of 67 months. These findings are discussed from the perspective of Bruner's theory, which states that cognitive processes of children under 8 years of age are dominated by the iconic mode of representation.     

Bilinguals' memory for medical information: Effects of modality,type of information and order of information

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to discover whether late bilinguals and monolmguals respond differently to memory tasks about information patainins to naturalistic but simulated medical consultations. The sample comprised 24 Italian/English late bilinguals and 24 English speaking monolinguals. Thne medical information texts were presented to subjects in either the oral or the written modality. Type of information (diagnostic or treatment). and order of presentation (first or last) of type of information were also manipulated. Subjects performed a word stem completion (WSC) task, followed by a he mall task. Overall, bilinguals recalled less information than the monolinguals, and were less likely to respond with an old word in the WSC task Bilinguals were more adversely affected by the order of presentation of treatment information than were monolinguals, remembering less treatment information when it occurred last. Both groups remembered information presented first better than information presented last, with treatment information slightly better remembered than diagnostic. No modality of presentation effects wen found Implications for compliance behaviours are discussed.

Medical information

bilingual

memory.     

Ambivalence, discomfort, and motivated information processing

In two studies we examined the nature and consequence of ambivalent attitudes. In the first study, we assessed whether holding ambivalent attitudes was aversive, and tested whether this aversion was resolved through biased information processing. To do this we manipulated participants’ attributions of the discomfort associated with an ambivalent message through a pill manipulation (tense vs. relaxed). Participants who attributed their discomfort to their ambivalence reported more negative emotions and generated more one-sided thoughts than participants who attributed their discomfort to the pill. In the second study, we examined the conditions necessary for ambivalence reduction. Results suggest that people spontaneously engage in biased information processing in order to resolve their ambivalence.     

Mitigating circumstance information, censure, and aggression

One hundred men received one of two levels of mitigating circumstance information either before or after being insulted or not insulted by a co-worker. Participants were then provided with an opportunity ostensibly to deliver aversive noise to the co-worker under either high or low social censure conditions. Physiological data and self-report measures revealed that participants who learned of mitigating circumstance information before being provoked exhibited smaller increases in physiological arousal and reported less annoyance than did those who learned of mitigating circumstance information after insult. Aggression data showed that angered participants evaluated their provoker more favorably and retaliated less when they learned of mitigation before rather than after being insulted. These findings supported attribution theory assumptions that mitigating circumstance information known before the provoking incident influences the individual's interpretation of harm, thereby reducing anger and the instigation to aggression. The reduced impact of information on aggression that is acquired after provocation may reflect the provoked individual's shift of attention from cues surrounding harm to a consideration of inhibitory factors for aggression.     

Age, information processing speed, and intelligence

Two parallel, but independent, literatures have grown out of observations that individual differences in information processing speed, as expressed in performance on choice reaction time (C RT) tasks, modestly correlate with individual differences in age and IQ test performance. These associations have prompted theories that individual differences in information processing speed functionally determine individual differences in performance of all cognitive skills by people of different general intellectual ability (Eysenck, 1986; Jensen, 1985) or age (Salthouse, 1982, 1985).

The experiments on which this literature has been based suffer from methodological weaknesses, such that comparisons have only been made very early in practice and have only concerned mean latencies for correct responses. An experiment compared 90 volunteers aged from 50 through 79 years who were grouped in terms of their performance on the AH 4 (Heim, 1968) IQ test. It explored the joint and independent effects of individual differences in age and in IQ test score and the effects of practice on mean latencies (C RTs) on the shapes of distributions of correct and incorrect responses and on the limiting speeds with which accurate responses can be made (speed/error trade-off functions). We suggest that a plausible explanation for the results is that individual differences in age and in general ability influence C RTs mainly because they affect the efficiency with which responses can be controlled to maximize speed while maintaining accuracy.     

Misattribution, preparatory information, and speech anxiety

In two experiments with undergraduate subjects, I compared the effects of misattribution versus information manipulations on speech anxiety. In Experiment 1, some subjects were allegedly exposed to subliminal noise while reading a speech in front of a camera. These subjects were told that subliminal noise makes people feel either unpleasantly aroused or pleasantly relaxed or that it has no effect. Subjects in a fourth condition were given accurate information about how they would feel (unpleasantly aroused) but were not exposed to the subliminal noise misattribution source. In Experiment 2, I replicated the arousing noise and accurate information conditions from the first study and added two new groups incorporating a delay that should preclude misattribution. In both experiments, the alleged presence of arousing subliminal noise reduced subjects' speech dysfluencies during the speech task, whereas the presentation of accurate information alone did not have a comparable ameliorative effect. Thus, both experiments supported the misattribution interpretation of why neutral labels for arousal can reduce emotionality.     

Public information, dissemination, and behavior analysis

Behavior analysts have become increasingly concerned about inaccuracies and misconceptions in the public, educational, and professional information portraying their activities, but have done little to correct these views. The present paper has two purposes in this regard. First, the paper describes some of the conditions that have given rise to these concerns. Second, and more important, the paper surveys various procedures and programs for the dissemination of public information that may correct inaccuracies and misconceptions. Special consideration is also given to issues involving (a) the assessment of the problem, (b) the content and means of dissemination, (c) the possible contributions of behavior analysts to current misunderstandings, and (d) relationships between behavior analysts and the media. The dissemination of accurate and unbiased information constitutes an important new undertaking for behavior analysis. The future of the field may depend in part on such activity.     

Introspection, consciousness, and human information processing

The paper tries, on rational and empirical grounds, to sketch a theory of introspective awareness, considered as an essential aspect of what is usually talked about in terms of "consciousness". The main thesis is that introspective awareness has an important role of play in human information processing. An attempt is made to clarify the connections between introspective awareness, selective attention, and short-term memory. A lot of human information processing goes on pre-attentively, "automatically", without the involvement of introspective awareness. What is introspectively attended to enters short-term memory, where it remains available for various kinds of mental operations; certain kinds of such operations are themselves introspectively accessible, and may become contents of short-term memory, where they in turn can be operated upon, and hence be modified voluntarily by the subject. Finally, various kinds of limitations to introspective awareness are discussed.     

Disfluencies signal theee,um, new information

Speakers are often disfluent, for example, saying theee uh candle instead of the candle. Production data show that disfluencies occur more often during references to things that are discourse-new, rather than given. An eyetracking experiment shows that this correlation between disfluency and discourse status affects speech comprehension. Subjects viewed scenes containing four objects, including two cohort competitors (e.g., camel, candle), and followed spoken instructions to move the objects. The first instruction established one cohort as discourse-given; the other was discourse-new. The second instruction was either fluent or disfluent, and referred to either the given or new cohort. Fluent instructions led to more initial fixations on the given cohort object (replicating Dahan et al., 2002). By contrast, disfluent instructions resulted in more fixations on the new cohort. This shows that discourse-new information can be accessible under some circumstances. More generally, it suggests that disfluency affects core language comprehension processes.