Information Extraction from Visual Displays and the Event-Related Brain Potential.

摘要

Three experiments, of increasing levels of complexity, are reported which examine two questions: (1) Will subjects extract more information from progressively more information stimuli in a probabilistic state-estimation task, as inferred from reaction time measures (2) Will the amplitude of the P300 component of the event-related brain potential, reflect the amount of information extracted. The three experiments used different versions of a process monitoring task in which the process could be in one of two states, and information bearing on the expectancy of one state or the other was conveyed by discrete informative cues. Occasional probes signalled imperative responses to the expected or unexpected states. The data indicated that in the simplest version of the task with only two levels of information value (Experiment 1), both questions were answered affirmatively. Keywords: Displays, Decision heuristics, Attention, Event-related potentials, Information integration, Medicine. (js)