Applications of Information Theory to Psychology

This chapter summarizes what is referred to as the “Application of Information Theory to Psychology.” Most of the chapter consists of a critical review of Attneave’s book (1959) which bears the same title as the one in this chapter. Chapter 2 deals with the application of IT to DNA and proteins which are molecules that carry information in biological system. In psychology, there is no analogue of the DNA or the proteins in biological systems. One can claim that psychology uses the letters of a language to study psychological problems, but this kind of application to IT applies to any branch of science, or any communication between people. This is, in fact, the original reason for the development of Information Theory by Shannon. One can think of the distribution of different psychological traits in a given population wherein one can apply IT concepts. As far as I know, no such investigation has been carried out. While quoting from Attneave’s book, I will make some critical comments, and also “translate” from the language of entropy to the language of SMI. In the second part of the chapter I will mention a few other articles on the same topics, and also, I will suggest some experiments using various 20Q-games in Sect. 3.6.