Guessing is an important component of everyday cognition. The present study examined the neural substrates of guessing using a simple card-playing task in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Subjects were scanned under four conditions. In two, they were shown images of the back of a playing card and had to guess either the colour or the suit of the card. In the other ...

We give an informative review of the notions Rényi’s $$\alpha $$ -entropy and -divergence, Arimoto’s conditional -entropy, Sibson’s -information, with emphasis on various relations between them. All these generalize Shannon’s classical information measures corresponding to =1$$ . present results data processing inequalities provide some new generalizations Fano’s inequality for any >0$$ This en...

A coupling of two distributions PX and PY is a joint distribution PXY with marginal distributions equal to PX and PY . Given marginals PX and PY and a real-valued function f(PXY ) of the joint distribution PXY , what is its minimum over all couplings PXY of PX and PY ? We study the asymptotics of such coupling problems with different f ’s. These include the maximal coupling, minimum distance co...

We examined whether 2 types of interpolated tasks (i.e., retrieval-practice via free recall or guessing a missing critical item) improved final recognition for related and unrelated word lists relative to restudying or completing a filler task. Both retrieval-practice and guessing tasks improved correct recognition relative to restudy and filler tasks, particularly when study lists were semanti...

Abstract Consider the following experiment: a deck with m copies of n different card types is randomly shuffled, and guesser attempts to guess cards sequentially as they are drawn. Each time made, some amount ‘feedback’ given. For example, one could tell true identity just guessed (the complete feedback model) or be told nothing at all no model). In this paper we explore partial model, where up...

In a probability-guessing paradigm, participants predict which of two events will occur on each trial. Participants generally frequency match even though frequency matching is nonoptimal with random sequences. The optimal strategy is to guess the most frequent event, maximizing. We hypothesize that frequency matching results from a search for patterns, even in random sequences. Using both calli...