[From Dick Robertson, 2009.06.10.1540CDT]
Following from my last point, I think I might have gained a little insight , indirectly, from Martin’s discussion here. Is the real point of Shouten’s article, accepting that people make more mistakes when hurrying, that he is trying to answer the question of -why- that is? I.e. how the organism works --that makes mistakes occur more often when action is speeded up?
If that’s the issue I have to say I missed it in reading his paper.
Best,
Dick R
[Martin Taylor 2009.06.10.17.38]
[From Dick Robertson, 2009.06.10.1540CDT]
Following from my last point, I think I might have gained a little insight , indirectly, from Martin's discussion here. Is the real point of Shouten's article, accepting that people make more mistakes when hurrying, that he is trying to answer the question of -why- that is? I.e. how the organism works --that makes mistakes occur more often when action is speeded up?
If that's the issue I have to say I missed it in reading his paper.
The issue is not that people make more mistakes when hurried, since as you say, anyone knows that. The issue is how to quantify the process that underlies this. The interesting, and at the time surprising, finding is that the information gain over time is strictly linear after a dead period that is quite probably (but not provably) attributable to the control processes involved in making the response. It's a measure of the information capacity of some channel or process that is apparently independent of the mechanism that produces the results; almost certainly this limitation is in the link between the physical light and the perceptual input function of the controlled perception, to which the light turning on is a disturbance.
The experiment can be seen as a methodological demonstration, but its value is that the results could be plugged into a model of a control loop in which that pathway was an internal path in a control loop, rather than being a pathway that contributes a disturbance to a controlled perception. It's a surrogate for the more general case, in which the input function for one controlled perception P incorporates many uncontrolled perceptions among its inputs -- the context, if you will, for whatever controlled perceptions contribute to P.
More generally, I quote my erstwhile professor, W.R.Garner, who said that the business of experimental psychology was largely of providing the numbers and mechanisms for what everyone knows to be true. Now we (or at least some of us) understand PCT to be an essential mechanism, which was not the case in the 1950s, but that doesn't detract from the validity of Garner's insight.
In PCT modelling, loop delay is an unassigned variable, a property of the loop. If what happens in one pathway can be quantified, then when that pathway is used in different control loops, what is known about that pathway becomes a localizable element of the model. It is easiest to examine such a pathway in circumstances where it is not internal to a control loop. I suspect one could similarly examine the output side by working with side-effects of control, but that's not something I've ever thought about outside the military intelligence context <http://www.mmtaylor.net/PCT/DFS93/DFS93_12.html>\.
Martin