Gain and Energetics in Information Processing

Information theory has offered a ripe foundation for developments in human performance during the 1950’s and 60’s. More recently, information theory, and the closely allied metaphor of the digital computer have provided a large number of successful models of human information processing, memory, and cognition (eg Card, Moran & Newell, 1983; Schweikert, 1980; Sternberg, 1982). This success has not been hampered by the fact that the basic unit of both information theory, and the digital computer is the bit, a binary quantity that itself has no analog range of values. It is either there in full force or it is not. While it is true that some aspects of the nervous system — the all or none action potential for example — operate in this binary fashion, other aspects behave in a continuous, analog fashion. Examples at the neuronal level are the graded dendritic potential preceding the all-or-non axon impulse, or the continuously varying levels of concentration of neural transmitters at the synapse. At more molar levels of analysis, continuity exists in the availability and distribution of hormones, and it approximated by the collective action of large populations of neurons, as measured by scalp recorded event-related brain potentials (ERP’s)

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