The Capacity for Generating Information by Randomization

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Response selection was studied independently of the stimulus by asking subjects to generate random sequences of letters or numbers. Experiment 1 varied rate of letter generation from ½ sec. to 4 sec. per item and showed that the redundancy of the sequence increased linearly with rate. Experiment 2 added random generation of letters as a secondary task to paced card sorting. Information load per card was varied from 1 through 2 to 4 to 8 alternatives, with sorting rate held constant. As predicted, the redundancy of the sequences generated increased linearly with sorting load. Experiment 3 varied number of items to be randomized. Rate of random generation increased systematically from 2 to 4 to 8 alternatives, but levelled out beyond this point, showing no difference between 16 and 26. In general, these results suggest a response-selection mechanism of limited informational capacity.