Re: information transmission analyses

[Gabor Pinter <andzsinszan@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Lance Nizami,

What you wrote regarding Information Theory is quite interesting to
me, as I daily meet people doing automatic speech recognition, whom
are really difficulty to convince that there is life beyond
information theory and Markov chains.
Can you please give us some references that argues that "The human
being is NOT a Shannon communication channel".
Or at least focusing on the controversial relation between perception
and information theory.

I appreciate your help.

Best regards.

Gabor Pinter







On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 1:44 AM, Iftikhar Riaz (Lance) Nizami
<Nizamii2@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> I did my Master's on this subject, and had to chance to read Attneave and
> the rest of the literature in depth.  Information theory as applied to
> psychology, as popularized  by Attneave after Garner & Hake, has nothing at
> all to do with transmission of anything.  When applied to traditional
> absolute judgment (identification) experiments, for example, it is merely an
> alternative measure of short-term sensory memory.  Which has nothing to do
> with Claude Shannon's "general communications system".  In your case, memory
> capacity is probably what the analysis will indicate.  I am surprised that
> anyone uses the Garner-Hake information approach anymore; mathematical
> psychologists (Duncan Luce, Donald Laming, Sandy MacRae, etc.) recognized
> its severe limitations years ago and abandoned it.  So (eventually) did
> acoustics users like Neff and Lutfi.  The human being is NOT a
> Shannon communication channel.  Granted, the measures that result from
> processing the confusion matrix are covariance measures of a sort.  In that
> case, ordinary covariance measures may provide a more meaningful way of
> analyzing your data.  In response to your question, then, none of TRANS,
> TRANS/INPUT or TRANS/TI are appropriate measures for your purposes.
> Information theory doesn't work that way.  Attneave got the math right,
> but that had already been done; but Attneave's interpretations (after Garner
> & Hake) were all dead wrong.  - Lance Nizami BSc (Physics) MSc (Biomedical
> Engineering) PhD (Psychophysics), Decatur, GA 30030
>
> In a message dated 2/24/2009 4:54:12 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
> caro_jacquier@xxxxxxxx writes:
>
> Dear members,
>
> I would like to analyse phonetic feature transmission (especially voicing
> and place of articulation of french plosive consonants) on the basis of
> individual confusion matrices. My study is about compressed speech
> perception in dyslexic adults.
> I have already downloaded the software for information transfer and SINFA
> analysis (Stuart Rosen ) and I have run the analyses (on 32 subjects).
> My first question is: which value is the more relevant in the report (TRANS,
> TRANS/INPUT or TRANS/TI) ?
> My second question is about individual confusion matrices: Do I have to do
> one analyse per subject ?
>
> I hope that someone could help me.
> Thank you very much.
> Best regards,
>
> Caroline
>
>
>
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