ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the application of NDS principles to a broad spectrum of theories in cognitive psychology. The exposition begins with psychophysics, which is the relationship between the strengths of physical stimuli and the psychological perception thereof. Classical theories of how people perceive patterns of stimuli and integrate them into patterns of what they actually see and hear follow. The conventional experimental paradigm has been based largely on reaction time, or the time delay between the presentation of a stimulus or pattern and either the recognition of the pattern or the making of a decision related to the content of those patterns. Reaction time itself is subject to many influences, and reaction-time studies are particularly germane to human factors engineering where information flows between people and their machines. Somewhere between stimulus and response is another world of information processing and learning; the key ideas from pre-NDS psychology are thus presented subsequently to reaction time.
