Loi de Hick

Hick's law, or the Hick–Hyman law, named after British and American psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman, describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices: increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically. The Hick–Hyman law assesses cognitive information capacity in choice reaction experiments. 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". The plain language implication of the finding is that increasing the number of choices does not directly increase the time to choose. In other words, twice as many choices does not result in twice as long to choose. Also, because the relationship is logarithmic, the increase in time it takes to choose becomes less and less as the number of choices increases. In 1868, Franciscus Donders reported the relationship between having multiple stimuli and choice reaction time. In 1885, J. Merkel discovered that the response time is longer when a stimulus belongs to a larger set of stimuli. Psychologists began to see similarities between this phenomenon and information theory. Hick first began experimenting with this theory in 1951. In his first experiment, there were 10 lamps arranged circularly around the subject. There were 10 Morse keys for each of his fingers that corresponded to these lamps. A running pre-punched tape roll activated a random lamp every 5 seconds; 4 electric pens recorded this lamp activation on moving paper in 4-bit binary. When the subject tapped the corresponding key, the 4 pens recorded the response, using the same system. Although Hicks notes his experimental design using a 4-bit binary recording process was capable of showing up to 15 positions and "all clear", in his experiment he required the device to give an accurate record of reaction time between 10 options after a stimulus for the experiment. Hick performed a second experiment using the same task, while keeping the number of alternatives at 10.