MATHEMATICAL THEORIES IN PERFORMANCE DECISION MAKING, AND LEARNING. A LITERATURE REVIEW

Literatures on mathematical theories in psychology between 1930 and 1959 were reviewed to provide an introduction for the nonmathematically trained researcher. The review is restricted to information theory, game and decision theory, and probabilistic learning theories. Conclusions were that a information theory has provided a language and an information measure but has not been used as a theory the information measure and the noisy channel theorem are used heuristically b applications of game and decision theory fail to satisfy any of the evaluative criteria and c probabilistic learning theories have been developing soundly. However, the Estes theory needs to be extended to a broader variety of situations while the Bush-Mosteller theory needs a subsidiary learning theory to solve problems of coordination of theoretical terms with experimental variables and to define its range of application. Author