ABSTRACT
Investigations of how humans process information have been performed within various elds including psychology, cognitive science, and information theory with the primary motivation being to better understand how human information-processing works and the factors that inuence it. On the basis that it provided a rigorous denition for the measurement of information, it can be argued that
32.1 Introduction .................................................................................... 32-1 32.2 Basic Principles ............................................................................... 32-2
32.4 Measurement Instruments and Procedures ...............................32-9 32.5 Present Limitations....................................................................... 32-12 Dening Terms ......................................................................................... 32-13 References .................................................................................................. 32-13 Further Information ................................................................................. 32-14
Shannon’s information theory (Shannon, 1948) has been and continues to be one of the more important developments to inuence both the science and engineering associated with human information processing. Several early attempts to apply it to human information processing (Hick, 1952; Hyman, 1953; Fitts, 1954) have stood the test of time and have provided the basis for subsequent eorts of both researchers and practitioners. ese works are central to the material presented here. In addition, the work of Wiener (1955) is also noteworthy in that it began the process of viewing human and articial information processing from a common perspective. Analogies between humans and computers have proven to be very useful up to certain limits.
