Re: your mail

[Al Bregman <bregman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Chuck,

Your first sentence tells the story: "if you want to look at it in a way
that is mechanism independent".  It seems to me that you'd only want to do
this if you didn't care about mechanisms.  Presumably what you might care
about is capacities, hoping to discover some invariant properties of our
capacities without regard to mechanisms [e.g., "magic number seven",
"power law" etc.].  Perhaps we're again we're again encountering a
difference between the psychophysical culture and the perceptual culture.

Best,

Al

P.S.  The best way I know of to gather a comparable measure for matrices
of different sizes is the "transmitted information" metric of information
theory.

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On Mon, 12 Oct 1998, Charles S. Watson wrote:

> Al:
>
> Well, here is another way to look at it, that is mechanism independent.
> Discrimination and identification can be (and generally are) tested by the
> same operations.  The result of the testing, assuming it is properly done
> and the response set is limited to the number of stimuli the experimenter
> intended to use (with noise, of course, there might be lots more) is an n
> x n matrix.
...

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