--- Derek Zahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Matt Mahoney writes:> Landauer used tests like having people look at > thousands of photos, then> tested them by having them look at more photos > (some seen before, some novel)> and asking if they have seen them before. > > On the face of it, this only measures one very narrow set of what a person > "learns" during the time the photos were presented... other details of the > experience of the photos themselves that are not measured by the specific > recall test, the surroundings, the experiment, the people involved, > continual adjustment of world-view and category boundaries, motor skills > adjusted due to physical interaction with the testing environment, > reflection (largely subconscious) on unrelated things in the back of the > subject's mind, etc. I believe this learning vastly overwhelms the trivial > narrow slit into the subject's memory that was later measured.
That's true. The visual perception process is altered after the experiment to favor recognition of objects seen in the photos. A recall test doesn't measure this effect. I don't know of a good way to measure the quantity of information learned. Consider the analogous task of learning lists of random words. In this case we know that the learned information cannot exceed the information content of the list, about 16 bits per word (assuming a 64K vocabulary). This is not very large compared to the quantity measured in a recall test. Of course this ignores the effects on the visual or auditory perceptual systems (depending on whether the words are written or spoken). -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=96140713-a54b2b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
