This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (October 2013) |
Hick's law, or the Hick–Hyman law, named after British and American psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman, describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices: increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically. The Hick–Hyman law assesses cognitive information capacity in choice reaction experiments. The amount of time taken to process a certain amount of bits in the Hick–Hyman law is known as the "rate of gain of information". The plain language implication of the finding is that increasing the number of choices does not directly increase the time to choose. In other words, twice as many choices does not result in twice as long to choose. Also, because the relationship is logarithmic, the increase in time it takes to choose becomes less and less as the number of choices increases.