Dear Dr. Pinter and others,
A comprehensive critical review that argues that "The human being is
NOT a Shannon communication channel" does not exist in print, to my
knowledge. And no editor is going to allow such a paper to be published,
because there are too many prominent people who stand to lose if their
misinterpretations are made public. Some of those people are senior
editors of well-known journals. There are, however, a number of published
papers that question whether the use of information-transmission measures in
psychology was really useful:
Cronbach, L.J. (1955) On the non-rational application of information
measures in psychology. In: Information theory in psychology (pp. 14-30),
ed. H. Quastler. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press.
Luce, R.D. (2003) Whatever happened to information theory in psychology?
Rev. Gen. Psych. 7, 183-188.
Gregory, R.L. (1980) Whatever happened to information theory?
(2) Perception, 9, 489-492.
Laming, D. (1973) Mathematical Psychology. Academic Press, NY.
Ashby, F.G. (1995). Resurrecting information theory. The American Journal
of Psychology, 108, 609-614.
A outstanding (and unfairly ignored) paper that deals decisively with
the issue of what "informational" absolute judgment experiments actually measure
is:
Siegel, W. (1972) Memory effects in the method of absolute
judgment. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 94, 121-131.
- Lance Nizami PhD, Decatur, GA 30030
In a message dated 2/26/2009 11:30:22 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
andzsinszan@xxxxxxxxx writes:
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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