Hick's law

The Hicksche law, even Hick - Hyman law, goes to William Edmund Hick back who has so 1952 described the relationship between response time and number of choices .. so, he laid the foundation for an information- theoretical model of intelligence, according to which the speed at which of a human being processed information, a measure of intelligence. With the Jensen - box you can see the response time in an election decision depending on the information content, ie measure the number of alternatives. The response time RT consists of the movement time BZ and the decision time. The movement time is the time which is needed for pressing the reply button, irrespective of the information content. The decision time is the product of information content in bits and speed of information processing IV The information content is the binary logarithm of the number of alternatives. The formula is:

In a simple approximation it may be assumed that for every doubling of the choices in one experiment, the reaction time of about 150 ms increases.

Roth was able to show in 1964 that more intelligent people in the reaction time with increasing number of alternatives significantly increases more slowly than less intelligent ( see graph). The Erlangen School of Information Psychology has developed from the concept of information processing speed.

In the traffic psychology further investigations were made. It was found that with regular exercise, the response times, regardless of the number of choices, go back to a fixed value. The graph shows the upper bound of the gray area of ​​the law and Hicksche as lower bound the effect of regular repetition.