Issues and Models Concerning the Processing of a Finite Number of Inputs 1

Eighty years ago or so the title would probably have been something like "An Attempt at Clarification of Proposed and Counter-Proposed Properties of Consciousness. •• The revolution in information, computer, and communication sciences (a Ia Shannon, Von Neumann. and Wiener) and the growing vapidity of behaviorism led in the 1950's and 1960's to a resurgent interest in centralism. that is. a renewed interest in the study of properties of the mind, as opposed to the exclusive peripheralistic study of stimulus-response correspondences. The terminology of the "new" psychology bas been almost completely drawn from the above disciplines, but very recently investigators have become less self-conscious about employing mentalistic terms and concepts that would have brought applause from the structuralists and phenomenologists of yesteryear (see, e.g., Boring, 1950). Althoagh skirting the interesting questions involving possible fruits and pitfalls of this trend, I might simply note that this chapter continues. after the introduction, in the recent tradition of use of information-processing argot. ln the present approach, we go inside the human qua information processor to as shallow or deep a level as we care to, and seize upon an abstract black box residing there in the processing chain. We shall think of our black box as engaging in the processing of some finite number of inputs (or elements). Words like "processing"