Chapter 16 – INFORMATION PROCESSING

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the origins of information processing approaches and the unity of sensation, perception, memory, retrieval, cognition, and knowledge. An information processing approach places heavy stress on processing as an active, multistage activity, and uses a very flexible concept of information as that which is being processed. A great impetus of the information processing approach has been its success in specifying converging operations. Not all experiments converge on a single explanation; however, this has been as much a function of the growing complexity and sophistication of the explanations as of any paucity of convergence of operations and design. The information processing revolution began with a new definition of information, one that reflected the amount of uncertainty reduction being communicated, quite independent of the particular content of the uncertainty being reduced, the stimuli, the responses, or even the communication channels being employed. Initially heralded as a major breakthrough, the promise of this definition has not been fulfilled, and it plays a relatively small role in information processing research or in any research in perception at all.