This is an excerpt from a new article I have posted in the Member section of my site at http://www.leewedlake.com/. It's about reaction time and how some people use Hick's Law to support an argument that kenpo doesn't work.
The “kenpo doesn’t work” argument is that the amount of options (techniques) slows decision-making at a rate proportionate to the amount of options. The reasoning the adherents use is that if you are faced with a right punch and know 15 techniques to handle it versus one or two, you will take that much more time to respond. I believe this is a flawed premise.
Here’s the law, as taken from a description in Wikipedia.
“Hick’s Law describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has. The Hick-Hyman Law assesses cognitive information capacity in choice reaction experiments.”
Note the word “choice” in the definition.
It’s not that simple. All this is tied into reaction time, also called processing time, stimulus/response and more elements I’ll list later. Reaction time was first researched in about 1885 and it was supposed that more choices did indeed slow processing time. A method to figure out the raw time was created but it was pointed out that it was flawed due to not compensating for the changes in the remaining perception and reaction processes that its removal caused.
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