Which device is used when information has to be accessed with minimum effort
Answers
Volunteers’ brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). In the EEG, a selective electric brain potential was observed in response to reading high- versus low-value words.
By analysing brain activity, researchers found that the brain regulates its resource use and tries to identify the most essential information.
A recently completed study indicates that the human brain avoids taking unnecessary effort. When a person is reading, she strives to gain as much information as possible by dedicating as little of her cognitive capacity as possible to the processing.
This is a finding presented in an article by specialists in computer science and psychology at the University of Helsinki, published in May in the Scientific Reports journal, a multidisciplinary open-access publication platform operated by the publishers of the Nature journal.
According to the study, the brain is processing information by taking into account the relative importance of the content that is being read. When the brain is interpreting the meaning of the words being read, it attempts to allocate resources to interpreting the words that provide as much information as possible on the content of the text.
Previous studies have shown that word length and frequency, as well as syntactic and semantic errors included in sentences in sentences affect brain activity to language.
In the recently published study, the perspective was expanded to the level above individual sentences, the discourse level. It was studied using six-sentence paragraphs. At this level, the relationship between words becomes increasingly complex, and the significance of context in interpreting individual words is increased. On the discourse level, very little about information processing by the brain has been known so far.
Difference between high and low value of information
The researchers developed a model based on information theory to determine the informativeness of words and associated these with brain activity. A study was conducted by having volunteers read sentences from Wikipedia entries while recording their brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG). In the EEG, a selective electric brain potential was observed in response to reading high- versus low-value words