Statistical analysis of discrimination games

Abstract.The hypothesis that meanings originate from discrimination tasks, in which an individual attempts to categorize N objects using a set of M sensory channels, is examined within a quantitative statistical perspective. Failure in discrimination triggers the refinement of a randomly-chosen sensory channel, starting thus an ongoing process, termed discrimination game, that ends only when all objects are differentiated. We show that the expected number of trials of a discrimination game diverges in the case of a single channel and scales with the power N2/M for M ≥2.