Re: your mail

["Charles S. Watson" <watson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Al,

Yes, I guess those are our version of C.P.Snow's dichotomy.  All my
maundering about sensory capabilities and response proclivities has really
been an effort to deal with both sides of it without having to depend on
private experience as primary data.  It is fine for inspiration, but not
so hot as proof.

Chuck

On Mon, 12 Oct 1998, Al Bregman wrote:

>
> 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.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> 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.
> ...
>
>

McGill is running a new version of LISTSERV (1.8d on Windows NT). 
Information is available on the WEB at http://www.mcgill.ca/cc/listserv