Information processing levels

TYPICAL ERRORS ASSOCIATED WITH DIFFERENT INFORMATION PROCESSING LEVELS EXAMPLES OF ERROR REDUCTION STRATEGIES ... 

Information processing levels looking, attending, acting and recalling... 

The lighter arrows represent typical shortcuts, which omit particular stages in the information-processing chain. These shortcuts may be "legitimate," and would only lead to errors in certain cases. For example, the worker may erroneously believe that he or she recognizes a pattern of indicators and may immediately execute a skill-based response, instead of moving to the rule-based level to apply an explicit diagnostic rule. 

Knowledge-Based Level of Control Information processing carried out consciously as in a imique situation or by an unskilled or occasional user... 

Rule-Based Level of Control In the context of chemical industry tasks, the type of human information processing in which diagnoses are made and actions are formulated on the basis of rules (e.g., "if the symptoms are X then the problem is Y"). 

Skill-Based Level of Control A mode of information processing characterized by the smooth execution of highly practiced, largely physical actions requiring little conscious monitoring. 

Slips Errors in which the intention is correct but failure occurs when carrying out the activity required. Slips occur at the skill-based level of information processing. 

An intriguing possibility thus presents itself. If some kind of a primordial information, and not higher-level constructs such as mass, energy, spin, and so forth, is indeed the real substance out of which all stuff is made - leaving aside for the moment, the question of form of that information - is it not natural to suppose that a discrete space-time structure, our heretofore pre-defined and static dynamical mediator, is itself built out of the same substance i.e. to suppose that space-time is not just a backdrop for information processing, there only to define what is local and what is not and where to and where from information is allowed to flow, but is itself a construct of primordial information This supposition is not entirely without precedent. 

Interestingly enough, most of the studies reporting positive effects of caffeine in information-processing tasks have used primarily or exclusively male subjects.39 42 43 45 48 59 In fact the only study that found positive cognitive effects of caffeine on females employed fatigued females, whose baseline arousal levels may have been lower.41... 

In addition to gender, task difficulty or complexity appears to be a substantial factor in arousal. Information processing tasks, particularly complex ones, have been shown to increase arousal levels in otherwise unstimulated subjects.60 The more complex the task, the higher the arousal level and the greater the chance that a given caffeine dosage would contribute to overstimulation. The additive nature of arousal sources — in this case caffeine and complexity — means that arousal is high when caffeine is present and complexity or difficulty level is substantial. The result is that caffeine impairs performance on complex tasks,50 51 particularly in female subjects. 

One study has reported effects on neurobehavioral function in lead-exposed workers at mean PbB levels of 50 pg/dL (Williamson and Teo 1986). Neurobehavioral function was measured using tests that are based on information processing theory in 59 lead workers and 59 controls matched for age, type of job, time on the job, education level, smoking history, and alcohol consumption. Statistically significant decreases in the lead-exposed workers were seen for critical flicker fusion reaction, simple reaction time, tracking speeds, hand steadiness tests, and sensory store memory. Sensory store memory speed showed a low but statistically significant correlation with PbB concentrations. Measurements of neurobehavioral function seemed well chosen, and repeated measures with associated appropriate statistics were used. 

At the process level, the flow of material and the flow of information are linked together by describing the transformation of information and material. Hence, it reflects the workflow of a supply chain. 

It is very important that such molecular-level motions are accompanied by changes of some chemical or physical property of the system, resulting in a readout signal that can be used to monitor the operation of the machine. The reversibility of the movement ie, the possibility to restore the initial situation by means of an opposite stimulus, is an essential feature of a molecular machine. Since such induced motions correspond to a binary logic systems of this kind could also prove useful for information processing. 

Comparative and phylogenetic considerations such as those outlined in the preceding paragraphs readily lead to speculation that the olfactory systems of modern animals share common antecedents and therefore probably also share common principles of functional organization and information processing. We might ask, What attributes of chemical stimuli do olfactory systems analyze and encode How are those features mapped in "neural space" at various levels of the olfactory pathway How are cells of the pathway organized, and what mechanisms do they use, to accomplish this analysis of odors in the environment ... 

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