Measurement of pathway structure
As has been said before, the elementary time is the fundamental unit in order to understand the structure of mental pathways which are thought as being composed of n elementary times.The number, n, is called the elementary number EN of the pathway. The me
- PDF / 30,338,279 Bytes
- 367 Pages / 439 x 666 pts Page_size
- 67 Downloads / 231 Views
Springer-Verlag Wien GmbH
Prof. Dr. Roland Kalb Erlangen, Germany
This work is subject to copyright. AU rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically those of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, broadcasting, reproduction by photocopying machi nes or similar means, and storage in data banks literature.
© 2001 Springer-Verlag Wien Originally published by Springer-Verlag Wien New York in 2001
Product Liability: The publisher can give no guarantee for ali the information contained in this book. This does also refer to information about drug dosage and application thereof. In every individual case the respective user must check its accuracy by consulting other pharmaceuticalliterature. The use of registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Typesetting: Composition Design Services, Minsk, Belarus Printing and binding: Manz, A-I0S0 Wien
Printed on acid-free and chlorine-free bleached paper
SPIN: 10784965
With 192 Figures
CIP data applied for
ISBN 978-3-211-83565-4 ISBN 978-3-7091-6255-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-7091-6255-2
Preface The model for this work was the description of the physical world by mathematical laws. It were always the simplest phenomena which were treated by this scientific method. Physicists studied simple motions in order to find the mathematical laws. Astronomists observed the orbits of planets in order to find the laws of gravity. One of the simplest measurable phenomenon in the brain is the stimulusresponse task. Such tasks have been known since the last century by psychiatrists and psychologists (v. Helmholtz). There exists a vast literature about the measurement and theory of simple reaction tasks and various choice reaction tasks, visual or auditory. They have been measured and have been described mathematically. One of the first models for the reaction times used a logarithmic function. But many intriguing questions remained open about reaction tasks especially the neural explanation of the findings. The new tool to investigate the neural structure of stimulus-response sequences was the computer. Now it was possible to measure the reaction times by using special programs, to compute the elementary times and the pathway structures from these reaction times, to evaluate the results statistically, to simulate the results, and to write this text. It was this instrument which permitted to save large amounts of data and evaluate them by special software written for this purpose. Thus it was possible to compute the time quanta and the pathways and to understand each reaction time as an integer multiple of this time quantum (plus a constant value). Computers were also usedto record the event-relatedpotentials.Two of the both fundamental parameters of this work (the time quantum called elementary time and the length of the linear pathway) have been conf
