Information input overload, does it exist? Research at organism level and group level

Abstract

Continuous information processing is essential for any living system. A living system's chance of surviving is predicted by its ability to process information. Miller (1978) is one of the advocates of this idea. To investigate what happens when the amount of input information to a single channel is gradually increased, one experiment was carried out at two levels—organism and group—of living systems

Human subjects were instructed to solve simple mathematical problems in a given time interval. The time interval was decreased for each successive exposure which meant that the information input rate (bits per second) increased. The output rate was also identified. The subjects were male and female university students, who took part in a four-year study program in systems science, who had an age range from 20 to 29. The number of samples at the organism level were 7 and at the group level 5. I expected, according to Miller's theory, the output rate to increase at first but after a while to become constant. I also expected the groups to have a lower channel capacity than the organisms

The study indicated that the possible output rate is dependent on the living system's emotional reactions. A state of confusion occurred, at both levels, when the input rate reached a critical level. The output rate, at both levels, increased slowly after the state of confusion which agrees with the expected result, namely that the output rate after a while becomes constant The information processing issue might be more complex and full of nuances than was conceptualized by Miller.