On the Rate of Gain of Information

Notes

## Bibliographic Reference

Hick, W.E. (1952) 'On the rate of gain of information', *Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology*, 4(1), pp. 11–26. doi: 10.1080/17470215208416600. `hick1952rate`

## BibTeX

```bibtex
@article{hick1952rate,
  author  = {Hick, W. E.},
  title   = {On the Rate of Gain of Information},
  journal = {Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology},
  volume  = {4},
  number  = {1},
  pages   = {11--26},
  year    = {1952},
  doi     = {10.1080/17470215208416600}
}
```

## Routing Note

Primary owner: human-centered-design-kb. This is the foundational primary source for Hick's law — the cognitive-foundations / decision-making law (choice reaction time scales with the logarithm of the number of alternatives) that underpins choice architecture in interface design. It resolves the previously **To be validated** Hick (1952) citation in `Wiki/hicks-law.md` (compiled from the Yablonski (2024) secondary source) and the same **To be validated** marker in `Wiki/selection-and-control-of-action.md`, where the Hick-Hyman law is cited as response-selection theory. The companion paper Hyman (1953), 'Stimulus information as a determinant of reaction time', is a separate source and remains **To be validated** until a retrievable copy is held in RAW. Provenance note: the RAW file is the Taylor & Francis version-of-record with a cover sheet as PDF page 1, so page locators use PDF p. N = orig. printed page N + 9.

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