Information Theory and Cognition: A Review

We examine how information theory has been used to study cognition over the last seven decades. After an initial burst of activity in the 1950s, the backlash that followed stopped most work in this area. The last couple of decades has seen both a revival of interest, and a more firmly grounded, expe...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 20; no. 9; p. 706
Main Author: Sayood, Khalid
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 14.09.2018
MDPI
Subjects:
average mutual information
Coding
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Information theory
neuronal codes
Neurons
predictive coding
Predictive control
Review
Schizophrenia
Trends
United States > US
information theory
cognition
average mutual information
predictive coding
neuronal codes
ISSN:1099-4300, 1099-4300
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We examine how information theory has been used to study cognition over the last seven decades. After an initial burst of activity in the 1950s, the backlash that followed stopped most work in this area. The last couple of decades has seen both a revival of interest, and a more firmly grounded, experimentally justified use of information theory. We can view cognition as the process of transforming perceptions into information—where we use information in the colloquial sense of the word. This last clarification is one of the problems we run into when trying to use information theoretic principles to understand or analyze cognition. Information theory is mathematical, while cognition is a subjective phenomenon. It is relatively easy to discern a subjective connection between cognition and information; it is a different matter altogether to apply the rigor of information theory to the process of cognition. In this paper, we will look at the many ways in which people have tried to alleviate this problem. These approaches range from narrowing the focus to only quantifiable aspects of cognition or borrowing conceptual machinery from information theory to address issues of cognition. We describe applications of information theory across a range of cognition research, from neural coding to cognitive control and predictive coding.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ObjectType-Review-3
content type line 23
ISSN:1099-4300
1099-4300
DOI:10.3390/e20090706