The Empirical Basis of Information Adaptation

Abstract

As noted above, as a result of mounting empirical evidences, Barlow (2001) has changed his view on the information reduction issue originally suggested in the 1960s by Attneave, himself and Watanabe. In this 2001 paper Barlow mentions that his and Attneave’s views are still valuable in that they shed light on the significance of redundancy; however, he doesn’t specify how these mounting evidences must change our view about the way Shannonian information applies to cognition. In fact, to the best of our knowledge there was no attempt yet to re-consider information theory in light of the more recent empirical findings. In what follows we suggest a first attempt in this direction. Similarly to previous attempts to apply Shannon to cognition, we’ll concentrate on visual information processing.