Searching for information is critical in many situations. In medicine, for instance, careful choice of a diagnostic test can help narrow down the range of plausible diseases that the patient might have. In a probabilistic framework, test selection is often modeled by assuming that people's goal is to reduce uncertainty about possible states of the…

Tag clouds generated in social tagging systems can capture the collective knowledge of communities. Using as a basis spreading activation theories, information foraging theory, and the co-evolution model of cognitive and social systems, we present here a model for an "extended information scent," which proposes that both collective and individual…

The information that individuals can hold in working memory is quite limited, but researchers have typically studied this capacity using simple objects or letter strings with no associations between them. However, in the real world there are strong associations and regularities in the input. In an information theoretic sense, regularities…

Restates A. D. Baddeley's hypothesis about the limited capacity for information processing: an individual's limited capacity to handle information (including production and storage), although presumably never reached in actual performance, exercises a definable constraint on performance. (RL)

Many of the puzzles of absolute judgment raised by George A. Miller in 1956 remain puzzles today. Literature directed toward capacity limitations in absolute judgment tasks and in short-term memory is reviewed, and some models that attempt to elucidate the phenomena are discussed. (SLD)

This experiment tested the hypothesis that cognitive change resulting from information inputs can be represented as linear motion of concepts in multidimensional space. The theoretical background is reviewed and the mathematical derivation of the hypothesis is given. A set of fifteen nations was scaled by 64 undergraduate and graduate students in…

A MODEL FOR THE ANALYSIS OF SPELLING BEHAVIOR WAS PRESENTED AND DESCRIBED AS REPRESENTING TOTAL SPELLING BEHAVIOR AS A FORM OF INFORMATION PROCESSING SYSTEM. THE MODEL REPRESENTS THE PROCESSING OF A NEED TO CORRECTLY SPELL A WORD THROUGH THE SEQUENCES OF VARIOUS PROCESSING CHANNELS TO THE WRITING OF THE WORD AND FEEDBACK FOR CORRECTION WHEN…

This article is an attempt to advance the effort to reconceptualize communication. (Author)

An information-theory model of human memory was tested in thirteen experiments which involved children (six years and older) and graduate students. The subjects conducted science investigations in laboratory and non-laboratory settings, solved problems of electrical circuits, and participated in classroom science lessons. The tasks used involved…

A probabilistic model (see SE 013 578) describing information processing during the cognitive tasks of recall and problem solving was tested, refined, and developed by testing graduate students on a number of tasks which combined oral, written, and overt "input" and "output" modes in several ways. In a verbal chain one subject…

Contends that communication education has a unique chance to prepare students for the "epistemological crises of our age" and uses William Perry's scheme of relativism in student development to assess three approaches to communication pedagogy. (MH)

Presents the Targowski/Bowman model of the communication process, which introduces a new paradigm that isolates the various components for individual measurement and analysis, places these components into a unified whole, and places communication and its business component into a larger cultural context. (MM)

Two experiments explored how memory for new information is affected by awareness of parallels to pre-experimental knowledge. Results suggest that the benefit of prior knowledge derives from the more elaborate encodings that analogy promotes. (Author/AM)

This study tested the ability of two semantic-memory models, feature-comparison and network, to explain differences in information processing times. The feature-comparison model assumes that an item's meaning is held in semantic memory as a set of characteristic and defining features, while the network model assumes that semantic memory is…

Defines a "communicate"--the objectification of a subject's internal model of the object of reality by means of a certain set of physical signs--and examines its information value with relation to intelligent systems. (CWM)