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Information Processing and the Interdisciplinary Perspective

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Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
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Synonyms

Computation; Computer metaphor; Instructionist

Definitions

Information – A statistical measure of uncertainty involved in the selection of a communicative message in a particular situation (Weaver 1949); a measure of unpredictability of which of a set of possible messages is selected or transmitted by an information source.

Information-Processing – a set of instructionist models of brain and cognitive activities that assume meaningful (communicative) environmental stimuli instruct internal, brain-based, algorithmic programs on how to build or organize an adaptive response to environmental stimuli.

Introduction

Biological and cognitive psychologists rely heavily on the concepts of information, information-processing, and symbolic representations to describe neurocognitive activities; they seldom consider brain activity in other ways (Epstein 2016). Unfortunately, when an idea or paradigm becomes orthodoxy, it stops us from asking questions that could lead to more productive...

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Correspondence to Paul R. Gladden .

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Gladden, P.R., Jacobs, W.J. (2019). Information Processing and the Interdisciplinary Perspective. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1310-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1310-1

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