Measures for investigating the contextual modulation of information transmission

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show how information theoretic measures can be used to analyse and interpret the results of psychophysical experiments designed to search for conditions under which information from one source modulates the transmission of information from another source. We therefore use measures of mutual and conditional information to analyse systems with two inputs. The information transmitted by such a system can be split into three components depending on whether it is shared between the two inputs or is specific to each. We are concerned here with distinguishing systems that use one input to modulate transmission of information about the other from systems that simply add both inputs, and show how the three components provide evidence for distinguishing between additive and modulatory effects. We also report numerical simulations of the sampling biasses and variances of these measures as a function of the sample size and propose minimum sample sizes that should be used to overcome the bias.