Search Results

This chapter surveys the research in information seeking behavior, defined as the patterns of behavior that people display when they experience information needs, make choices about where and how to look for information, and reflect or act on the information they see. The chapter examines the influence on sense-making (Dervin), information search process (Kuhlthau), and information use environment (Taylor). It then develops an integrative model that includes the cognitive, affective, and situational dimensions of human information seeking behavior.

This chapter introduces and elaborates on the central idea that executives differ in what they personally bring to their decision-making situations and therefore differ in what they decide and how they behave. The chapter lays out a comprehensive model of how this process occurs, hinging on the executive's “orientation”—or the amalgam of experiences, values, personality, and mind-set that the executive possesses at any given point. This executive orientation limits and distorts the actual stimuli confronting the executive, such that his or her “construed reality” is a result of a three-stage filtering process: limited field of vision, selective perception, and interpretation. The chapter then addresses the psychological side of executive orientations, focusing on executive values, cognitive content and structure, and personality.

This chapter lays the foundations for a historical-contextual decision making that aims beyond tactics and information toward understanding and sensemaking. It does so by looking closely at managerial information processing: what constitutes knowledge; how knowledge is communicated around an organization; and how cultivated expertise can fill in for uncertain or incomplete knowledge.

This chapter examines the use of event-related potentials (ERPs) in the study of human information processing. Topics discussed include mental chronometry, chronopsychophysiology, the locus of experimental effects, and the structure and function of the information processing system.

This chapter reviews ideas and work done or in progress which seem to indicate where basic research on human decision processes is going. These ideas have two closely related foci: dynamic decision theory and Probabilistic Information Processing systems (PIP). The chapter begins by presenting the problem of dynamic decision theory and by proposing a taxonomy of human decision tasks to which such a theory should be applied. It then reviews current thought and experimentation in five areas that are crucial to the development of such a theory: information seeking, man as intuitive statistician, sequential prediction, Bayesian information processing, and dynamic programming. Finally, the idea of a probabilistic information-processing system is presented, both as a kind of system which is urgently needed in several military contexts and as a vehicle for research in dynamic decision theory.

This historical chapter examines the fundamental relation between memory and attention. Information that is temporarily in or near conscious awareness is in the focus of attention, so attention and memory can be viewed as two sides of the same coin. The emerging information processing field led to the model proposed in a 1988 Psychological Bulletin article by the author, upon which the book is based. The model distinguishes between two sources of short-term memory: the currently, temporarily activated elements from long-term memory and the subset of activated elements that are in the focus of attention. Presumably, although relatively unprocessed elements of long-term memory can be automatically activated, new associations between items, and between each item and its context, may be set up only in the focus of attention. Attention is controlled partly by volition (central executive processes) and partly by changes in stimulation that recruit attention.

This chapter examines recent findings about the development of numerical cognition in hearing individuals to understand the observed lag in arithmetical and mathematical performance of deaf children and adults. It discusses how the information processing strategies of deaf individuals may influence the learning, representation, and retrieval of numerical and mathematical knowledge. The focus is on basic numerical processes that underlie mathematics and that subsequently feed into our understanding of related topics in science and technology.

The chapter emphasizes a level of analysis at which subdivisions are avoided until shown to be fundamental. It helps especially in investigations of short-term memory, selective attention, and the relationship between them. Fundamental, seemingly obvious concepts actually have been questioned in the literature and so are revisited. The chapter summarizes ways in which memory and attention appear to be closely interrelated. This is important because it includes observations that could be drawn only by aggregating across previous chapters. Directions for evolution of the theoretical framework are considered. The cognitive concepts are mapped onto brain structures. Moreover, both behavioral and brain research methods are challenged to make the best use of multiple levels of analysis. In this regard, even positing a homunculus, a portion of the mind that somehow carries out volition, is useful to divide human information processing into subcategories, allowing some of them to be better understood.

This chapter reviews neuropsychological evidence concerning representational processes and dual coding theory. The evidence is provided by studies of functional differences between the two cerebral hemispheres and different regions within each hemisphere as inferred from performance on tasks that implicate verbal and nonverbal processes in different degrees. The theoretical emphasis is on observations that bear on the verbal-nonverbal symbolic distinction, the more specific sensorimotor systems of which the symbolic systems are comprised, and the different levels of processing within and between systems. Evidence relevant to specific functional distinctions, such as sequential as compared to synchronous or parallel processing, is also considered.

The influence of social communicative activities on the emergence of working memory capacity in infants and young children is not well understood. On one hand, working memory capacity is thought to be an attentional executive resource that resides within the psychology of the individual. However, the complexity of children's social worlds sets the attentional demands that, in turn, require children to draw on working memory resources. Therefore, the issue is not whether working memory develops, but how does it develop and what are the influences that mediate the course of this development? The chapter begins with a discussion of constructivist theories and information processing models of an executive working memory system. Findings from studies of brain activity in infants are then presented to affirm that working memory is available to children early in the lifespan. The remaining discussion describes how social communication potentially influences the course of working memory development.

A primary task for the developing infant is to categorize and represent the large number of complex and wide-ranging objects in the world. Without this ability, memory storage would be overstretched, developing a faculty of language would be impossible, and inductive generalization would often err. This chapter presents findings following an examination of the processes of such categorization and representation. The work can broadly be characterized by two themes that emerge from an information-processing background. The first theme is the importance of understanding infants themselves as information processors. The second theme is the critical role of categorization in cognitive development. These themes are apparent as seen in individual and collaborative work on understanding how infants attend to, process, and use dynamic features such as moving parts and function in categorization. This chapter illustrates how the same constructivist approach applies to understanding when and how infants use dynamic features to categorize across those phenomena.

This introductory chapter sets out the basic framework for the book, imagining the ways in which a person might perceive and interpret the meaning of some sounds recorded onto an unlabelled CD. It goes on to present the book's basic perspective on music and ecological theory; the relationship between listening and meaning; the relationship between psychology and musicology; the musical repertories and cultures considered; and the book's relationship to music history. The chapter concludes with a critical discussion of the information processing approach to music perception.

This chapter discusses the combination of simple signals to form complex signals. When multiple senders convey different information to a receiver (or to multiple receivers) the receiver is confronted with a problem of information processing. How does one take all these inputs and fix on what to output — what to do? Logical inference is only part of this bigger problem of information processing. It is a problem routinely solved every second by our nervous system as floods of sensory information are filtered, integrated, and used to control conscious and unconscious actions.

This chapter begins with a brief survey of the history of logical thought, and of the basics of the interplay of natural processes that have led to the evolution of computational intelligence, both biological and artificial. This is followed by a compact introduction to Darwin's theory of biological evolution. The relevance and importance of Lamarckism in artificial evolution is emphasized. The notion of self-organizing systems and the evolution of distributed intelligence in such systems is illustrated by considering the example of a beehive. Emergent behaviour, pattern formation, and perpetual novelty in complex open systems are described. The various topics coming under the umbrella term ‘computational intelligence’ are introduced. Not only software, but even hardware can evolve, and some examples are described. The last section of this chapter is about some of the design principles discovered by scientists in biological networks.

This chapter deals with the information-processing account of Fred Dretske, an account that combines the representational aspect of mental content and the teleological interpretation of its cognitive aspect. The core of his account of intentionality lies in his view of the human brain and its perceptual organs as an information-processing system, which in turn is based on ‘information theory’. His works Knowledge and the Flow of Information and Seeing and Knowing show that by using the information-processing input mechanism called the senses, and treating the brain as the information processor, one can build up an account of those paradigms' sophisticated intentional states, knowledge and belief. The chapter also discusses belief states, representational systems, and brain-level functional accounts and consciousness.

This presents a multiple-level contextual approach to test the impact of contextual variables on child-level outcomes. It is hypothesized that child welfare agencies with high levels of both information processing and interagency collaboration will be associated with better child functioning outcomes.

This part presents four chapters on the concept of retrieval. The first chapter reviews four basic and greatly simplified sets of observations, that have been already published and which are relevant as a foundation for making some conclusions about how molecular mechanisms of retrieval might operate. It then presents some deductions, conclusions, and speculations about the molecular basis of retrieval and where the future might lie in this untapped area of molecular neurobiology. The next chapter discusses the apparent properties of retrieval and the characteristics of recently reactivated and recently acquired memories. The third refers to the concept of retrieval as information processing at a particular temporal stage of memory, namely that at which memory is made use of, and to the environment prevailing at that time, which includes the mental environment. The fourth chapter presents a synthesis of the chapters in this part.

This chapter discusses various aspects of the relationship between measurement and day-to-day activity. It emphasizes the potential contribution of academic knowledge to performance management activities. It first reviews situations and ways in which performance management has a track record of working well, then moves on to note that unfortunately, such activity on its own was unlikely to contribute to sustainable competitive advantage. Finally, using a practice theory perspective, it turns the problem of ‘you get what you measure’ on its head. This perspective offers an appreciation of the role of measurement in the construction of orderly behaviour that can help re-establish a positive link between performance measurement and skilful practical activity.