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Neuroscientists act as proxies for implied anthropomorphic signal-processing beings within the brain, Homunculi. The latter examine the arriving neuronal spike-trains to infer internal and external states. But a Homunculus needs a brain of its own, to coordinate its capabilities – a brain that necessarily contains a Homunculus and so on indefinitely. Such infinity is impossible – and in well-cited papers, Attneave and later Dennett claim to eliminate it. How do their approaches differ and do they (in fact) obviate the Homunculi?

The Attneave and Dennett approaches are carefully scrutinized. To Attneave, Homunculi are effectively “decision-making” neurons that control behaviors. Attneave presumes that Homunculi, when successively nested, become successively “stupider”, limiting their numbers by diminishing their responsibilities. Dennett likewise postulates neuronal Homunculi that become “stupider” – but brain-wards, where greater sophistication might have been expected.

Attneave’s argument is Reductionist and it simply assumes-away the Homuncular infinity. Dennett’s scheme, which evidently derives from Attneave’s, ultimately involves the same mistakes. Attneave and Dennett fail, because they attempt to reduce intentionality to non-intentionality.

Homunculus has been successively recognized over the centuries by philosophers, psychologists and (some) neuroscientists as a crucial conundrum of cognitive science. It still is.

Cognitive-science researchers need to recognize that Reductionist explanations of cognition may actually devolve to Homunculi, rather than eliminating them.

Two notable Reductionist arguments against the infinity of Homunculi are proven wrong. In their place, a non-Reductionist treatment of the mind, “Emergence”, is discussed as a means of rendering Homunculi irrelevant.

For half a century, neuroscientists have used Shannon Information Theory to calculate “information transmitted,” a hypothetical measure of how well neurons “discriminate” amongst stimuli. Neuroscientists’ computations, however, fail to meet even the technical requirements for credibility. Ultimately, the reasons must be conceptual. That conclusion is confirmed here, with crucial implications for neuroscience. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Shannon Information Theory depends upon a physical model, Shannon’s “general communication system.” Neuroscientists’ interpretation of that model is scrutinized here.

In Shannon’s system, a recipient receives a message composed of symbols. The symbols received, the symbols sent, and their hypothetical occurrence probabilities altogether allow calculation of “information transmitted.” Significantly, Shannon’s system’s “reception” (decoding) side physically mirrors its “transmission” (encoding) side. However, neurons lack the “reception” side; neuroscientists nonetheless insisted that decoding must happen. They turned to Homunculus, an internal humanoid who infers stimuli from neuronal firing. However, Homunculus must contain a Homunculus, and so on ad infinitum – unless it is super-human. But any need for Homunculi, as in “theories of consciousness,” is obviated if consciousness proves to be “emergent.”

Neuroscientists’ “information transmitted” indicates, at best, how well neuroscientists themselves can use neuronal firing to discriminate amongst the stimuli given to the research animal.

A long-overdue examination unmasks a hidden element in neuroscientists’ use of Shannon Information Theory, namely, Homunculus. Almost 50 years’ worth of computations are recognized as irrelevant, mandating fresh approaches to understanding “discriminability.”

The purpose of this paper is to examine the popular “information transmitted” interpretation of absolute judgments, and to provide an alternative interpretation if one is needed.

The psychologists Garner and Hake and their successors used Shannon's Information Theory to quantify information transmitted in absolute judgments of sensory stimuli. Here, information theory is briefly reviewed, followed by a description of the absolute judgment experiment, and its information theory analysis. Empirical channel capacities are scrutinized. A remarkable coincidence, the similarity of maximum information transmitted to human memory capacity, is described. Over 60 representative psychology papers on “information transmitted” are inspected for evidence of memory involvement in absolute judgment. Finally, memory is conceptually integrated into absolute judgment through a novel qualitative model that correctly predicts how judgments change with increase in the number of judged stimuli.

Garner and Hake gave conflicting accounts of how absolute judgments represent information transmission. Further, “channel capacity” is an illusion caused by sampling bias and wishful thinking; information transmitted actually peaks and then declines, the peak coinciding with memory capacity. Absolute judgments themselves have numerous idiosyncracies that are incompatible with a Shannon general communication system but which clearly imply memory dependence.

Memory capacity limits the correctness of absolute judgments. Memory capacity is already well measured by other means, making redundant the informational analysis of absolute judgments.

This paper presents a long‐overdue comprehensive critical review of the established interpretation of absolute judgments in terms of “information transmitted”. An inevitable conclusion is reached: that published measurements of information transmitted actually measure memory capacity. A new, qualitative model is offered for the role of memory in absolute judgments. The model is well supported by recently revealed empirical properties of absolute judgments.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of the symmetrical disposition of information items displayed on the front of product packaging on perceived complexity, perceptual fluency, aesthetic evaluation and product purchase intention.

A sample of 104 participants was exposed to fast-moving consumer goods packaging. A within-subject design experiment was carried out to assess the influence of the symmetrical disposition of information items displayed on the front of the packaging. ANOVA and a PROCESS procedure to assess mediation (Hayes, 2013) examined the relationships among the factors influenced by symmetry.

This study found that the symmetrical disposition of information items around the vertical axis (mirror symmetry) decreased visual complexity and highlighted an “indirect-only mediation” of visual complexity on the aesthetic evaluation of the packaging through processing fluency. This research also highlighted the fact that packaging aesthetic evaluation had a positive influence on purchase intention.

This study extends knowledge on package design by showing that the elements on which the producer can act (in this case, symmetry on the front of packaging) have an influence on the consumer’s evaluation of the product and intention to purchase.

This paper outlines 4 assumptions behind attempts to explain the sequential organization of communication behavior during conflict. These assumptions were supported by an analysis of behavioral sequences coded from 9 hostage negotiations and 20 divorce mediations. Analyses showed that negotiators use only a small proportion of available responses to other party's behavior, and that this proportion rapidly decreases as sequence length increases. Critical to this channeling in behavior was the triple‐interact (i.e., cue‐response‐cue‐response), which represents the maximum sequence length required to enable accurate prediction of negotiators' future behavior. More detailed analysis showed that the triple‐interact reduced uncertainty in behavior by over 70%, which compares to less than 1% from knowledge of negotiation context and approximately 10% from knowledge of individual differences.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the reference works useful for finding written information on the North American Indian (that is, Indians presently and in the past living in what is now the United States and Canada).

A wide‐ranging look at the nature of information and at associated problems and concepts, based on a critical review of the literatures of library and information science, organization science, cognitive sciences, communication theory, and other disciplines.

An analysis is proposed of the consequences of the limitations inherent in observation processes PA and PB on the joint, marginal and conditional entropies of two continuous sets A and B of events, observed by means of PA and PB. These events can be statistically dependent. Properties of asymmetry appear which do not exist in the Shannonian model. They induce a new definition of mutual information.

Methods are presented for the quantitative calculation of the amount of statistical, semantic and pragmatic information in the summary information flow in communication systems represented by nerve cells. These methods have been tried in the analysis of spike trains of central neurons during their reliable activity, i.e. adaptation and formation of a conditioned reflex. Some possible mechanisms of ensuring reliability and stability of informational activity of nervous communication systems are discussed.

The measures of information theory, suitably modified, can be used as measures of the strength of intervariable relations. This paper defines the normalized transmission between two variables; it is a measure of the degree to which knowledge of one variable is helpful in guessing the value of the other, and it can be applied to static or dynamic relations. The usefulness of the measure is illustrated by an example consisting of seven weather variables, where it is shown that the normalized transmission leads to a natural partition of the system into subsystems, within which the intervariable relations are strong and between which they are weak. Normalized transmission is also compared with other measures of relatedness.