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Hick's law facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

Hick's law, or the Hick–Hyman law is named after British and American psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman. It describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices.

Increasing the number of choices increases the decision time logarithmically. The amount of time taken to process a certain amount of bits in the Hick–Hyman law is known as the rate of gain of information.

Hick's law may support some computing menu design decisions. For example, to find a given word (e.g. the name of a command) in a randomly ordered word list (e.g. a menu). If the list is alphabetical, and the user knows the name of the command, he or she may be able to use a subdividing strategy that works in logarithmic time.

Images for kids

  • EN HICK

    Roth's application of Hick's law "Bit" is the unit of log2(n)

  • Sigmoid2

    The sigmoid function remains a better representation than the linear function of the relationship between predictability and reaction time..

See also

Kids robot.svg In Spanish: Ley de Hick para niños

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