Hick's Law, The Deceitful Bitch

Musashi

I'm going to post this from a Hock Hocheim newsletter,the folks into the more cerebral side of SD may appreciate it! njoy!

"Hock on Hick
www.hockscqc.com

If you are reacting to an attack, as the good guys generally are, you are already behind the action curve. How behind, scientists have labored intensely to discover over the last 50 years, and like splitting the atom, they have split the single second into one thousand parts to do it.

It was about 25 years ago when I attended a police defensive tactics course and was rather insulted by the attitude of the instructor. We were treated like Neanderthals. He declared, “KISS! Keep it simple, stupid. Hick’s Law says that it takes your mind too long to choose between two tactics. Worse with three! Therefore, I will show you one response. " I wondered then and there, "Am I to stay simple and stupid my whole life? Who is this Hick and waht is his law?"

It takes too long? How long was long, I wondered? We learned one block versus a high punch that day. What about against a low punch, I thought? My one high block fails to cover much else but that one high attack.

***

Later that evening while coaching my son’s little league baseball team, I saw this very instructor coaching his team on another ball field. He was teaching ten year-olds to multi-task and make split-second decisions as his infielders, working double plays with runners on base. It was clear the coach expected more from these kids than he did from we adult cops that morning. Hick’s Law was not to be found on that kid's diamond.

Hick’s Law, started out as a paper written in 1952 and simply set up an equation that states the mind takes time to decide between options. For the record, the equation is TR+a+b{Log2 (N)}. Another famous police trainer mentioning Hick's law said:

“Lag time increases significantly with the greater number of techniques.”

Significantly and greater number are the key unknowns in that equation. What is significant and how many are greater. Others say:

" ...it takes 58% more time to pick between two choices."

58% sounds like a lot, but 58% of what? Others, usually police instructors, cavalierly say:

“...it takes about a second to pick a tactic.” and,

“Selection time gets compounded exponentially when a person has to select from several choices,”

Many modern instructors just associate a doubling ratio to Hicks-that is, for every two choices, selection time doubles per added choice.Yet, despite all these quotes on times, Hick made no official proclamation on the milliseconds it takes to decide between options. There is a general consensus in the modern Kinesiology community that Simple Reaction Time, called SRT, takes an average of 150 milliseconds to decide to take an action. That’s considerably less than a quarter of a second-or 250 milliseconds. Lets re-establish that there are 1,000 milliseconds in one second-a fact that makes all these time studies fall into proper perspective. 1,000!

Based on the doubling rule with the common SRT average, then choosing between two choices must take 300 milliseconds. Run out the time-table. Three choices? 600 milliseconds. Four choices? 1 second and 200 milliseconds. A mere five choices? 2 seconds and 400 milliseconds! Six? 4 full seconds and 800 milliseconds. Should a boxer learn 5 tactics? That would mean 9 seconds and 600 milliseconds to choose one tactic from another? You would really see people physically shut down while trying to select options at this point and beyond. Has this been your viewing experience of a football game? Basketball? Tennis? Has this been your experience as a witness to life?

One begins to wonder how a football game can be played, how a jazz pianist functions, or how a bicyclist can pedal himself in a New York City rush hour. How does a boxer, who sees a spilt-second opening, select a jab, cross, hook, uppercut, overhand, or to step back straight, right or left? If he dares to throw combination punches how can he select them so quickly?

Under this exponential increase rule, it would seem athletes would stand dumbfounded, as index cards rolled through their heads in an attempt to pick a choice of action. Every eye jab could not be blocked if the blocker was taught even just two blocks. The eye attack would hit the eyes as the defender sluggishly selects between the two blocks.

Athletic performance studies attack the doubling rule. We need not only look to athletes. How can a typist type so quickly? Look at all the selections on a computer? 26 letters-plus options! How can your read this typed essay? How can your mind select and process from 26 different letters in the alphabet? It is obvious that the exponential rule of “doubling” with each option, has serious scientific problems when you run a math table out.

Hick’s Law has become barely a sketch or an outline for the thousands of performance experiments in laboratories since 1952. New tests upon new tests on skills like driving vehicles, flying, sports and psychology, have created so many layers of fresh information. Larish and Stelmach in 1982 established that one could select from 20 complex options in 340 milliseconds, providing the complex choices have been previously trained. One other study even had a reaction time of .03 milliseconds between two trained choices! .03! Merkel’s Law, for example, says that trouble begins when a person has to select between 8 choices, but can still select a choice from the eight well under 500 milliseconds. Brace yourself! Mowbray and Rhoades Law of 1959, or the Welford Law of 1986, found no difference in reaction time at all, when selecting from numerous, well-trained choices.

Why the time differences? I conducted an email survey of 50 college university professors of Psychology and Kinesiology. It is crystal clear that training makes a considerable difference. Plus-people, tests and testing equipment are different. Respondents state that every person and the skills they perform in tests vary, so reaction times vary. One universal difficulty mentioned by researchers is the mechanical task of splitting the second in their test-that is identifying the exact millisecond that the tested reaction took place. Many recorded tests are performed by under-grads in less than favorable conditions.

The test-givers themselves have reaction time issues that effect time recording! Milliseconds are wasted as the tester sees the testee react, then reacts with a stopwatch device, either estimating or losing milliseconds in their own reaction process. Common test machinery takes milliseconds to register a choice. Results can get vague and slippery within the tiny world of a single second. Documenting milliseconds in the 1950s was almost impossible even in the most sophisticated labs, yet modern instructors ignore modern research and use the 1950s numbers to base their training methodolgies.

Six decades of performance testing have passed, with new technology and on regular "walk-around" people along with low, medium and high performance sports athletes. New methodologies have been created to increase SRT and selection times. Training like;

<>Sequential Learning- the stringing of tasks working together like connected notes in music, really reduces reaction and selection time.

<>Conceptual Learning is another speed track. In relation to survival training, this means a person first makes an either/or conceptual decision, like “Shoot/Don’t shoot,” or, “Move-In/Move Back.” Rather than selecting from a series of hand strikes, in Conceptual Learning, the boxer does not waste milliseconds selecting specific punches, but rather makes one overall decision, “punch many times!” The trained body then takes over, following paths learned from prior repetition training.

Sure, simple is good. I am all for simple. And reaction time is an important concern when you are dodging a knife, pulling a gun, etc. There comes a point in a learning progression when there are too many reactions/techniques to an attack. On the other end of Hock's Law continuum is the brick wall called "Hyper-Vigilance," the subject of another essay.

For myself, I like to go about three-deep per response as a general rule. Four may be pushing the limit for the moderate student, though I know students who can handle way more. As a professional instructor, I busy myself learning more than three options, so I can teach the best three to differing skill-levels and body shapes.

Before trainers start bringing up Hick’s Law they need to know the rest of the science since the 1950s, that improved training really decreases reaction time, and not use Hick as an excuse to cage us down to one-step, dumb Neanderthals.

It seems like the last 6 decades, Hick’s Law has become a legacy of research. Hick’s Legacy is really telling us to train more and smarter, not necessarily to be stupid and learn less. Remember one of Einstein’s Laws-“Keep it simple…but not too simple.” I like the sound of that much better than stupid instructors KISSING me to keep things stupid."

Musashi

And how about this for another RBSD Guys view of same article?

"Hick's law may be untrue, but does that change things?

The brain is a lazy organ (mine is, anyway). Cognition is an energy intensive process. Chess grandmasters lose significant amounts of weight during a tournament, such is the energy required to think things through with any degree of concentration. To constantly do things the hard way and devote brainpower to every action would be counter-productive to the survival of the species as the calorie intake required would be vast.
Evolution resulted in brains that essentially cheat their way through life.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy hound.

When learning to read as a child, that sentance would have required the assistance of a finger to follow and careful searching of the memory to remember how the "ou" sound in hound would be pronounced.
As an adult, things are different...

The qicuk bowrn fox jpemud oevr the lzay hunod

What would have utterly flummoxed the child is remarkable easy to the literate. Thousands upon thousands of hours of reading have taught the brain to read the bare minimum (the first and last letter) and make an educated guess based on context. To say that we actively read every word we see is a falsehood. The brain does not perform very complex actions quickly until intimate familiarity with the task is acheived.

Typing is another example mentioned, so how do secretaries type? They start off learning to type letter by letter. But you can only REALLY type when you count a word as a single unit. The sequence of movements for the word "the" is soon learned as it is a very common word. The brain switches onto this fact and saves the movement for "the" not, T, H and E. As the programs for movement are built for the words you will fill 90% of any document with, the speed of your typing will rise.
Similarly so for chess. Single moves are not stored in the grandmasters memory, but 16-20 move plays he remembers from past matches. Good chess is memory, not innovation.

To the martial artists, who have a burning desire to master the whole sphere
of combat, they must invest tens of thousands of hours into their training.
To return to the above example of "lazy reading", we see that as children, we process each letter, but grow to process word as single units. Putting aside the limitations of life expectancy, if an individual were to read EVERYTHING on this earth, we could expect him to start processing information as sentences or even paragraphs. As experience and knowledge grows, so do the units by which the information is processed.
As a beginner we process techniques (letters). The grand master, with a lifetime of training and memory, processes principles (page) instead, allowing dazzling displays of skill.

But are we all "martial artists?" Do all your students want to be?

If we want to speak passable French, to be able to ask directions, buy food, charm the waitress and other such essentials, we learn conversational French in a part-time course at the local college.
If we were asked to work alongside the intellectuals currently composing the definitive French Dictionary (a huge white elephant work, scheduled to be finished in two hundred years time) we would require the minumum of X years immersed in the correct environment to even approach skills needed.

If you're teaching housewives to defend themselves in a six hour seminar, it would be FOLLY to teach them as though they are martial academics. They're tourists in the martial world, not scholars.
The cop instructor mentioned in Hock's article was right to emphasise the KISS philosophy. Cops have woefully small amounts of time budgeted for H2H - it would be counter-productive to get academic.

There are undoubtedly some very, very talented martial artists out there. They could beat my ass, I'm sure of it. But somewhere along the line, they lost sight of the fact that you need to invest a significant portion of your life to training to make their stuff work. Thats A-OK if the student is willing to do that. It is not the same game if they want high payoff for minimum investment."

Musashi

"During the Olympics this summer I watched a brief clip about the US Women's Softball team's training. They had discovered that the main ingredient which made good hitters was the ability to 'see fast'. They trained this by using a Tennis ball launcher with the balls moving really fast (I forget how fast). Each ball had a number on it written in either red or blue ink. The batters not only had to hit the tennis balls, but also 'call' the color and number of each one as they did so. At first they couldn't possibly do it, and even had trouble hitting the balls, but soon they were able to call each one in flight, and dramatic improvements in their hitting abilities followed."
"An interesting way of looking at the attribute of "dynamic visual acuity" is something called the "Landolt C test," where a letter "C" of a standardized size is rotated at +/-100 rpm. A few studies have shown that elite athletes are able to identify which direction the open part of the letter is facing at any one instant at much high rotational speeds than normal people can. This appears to be a type of intelligence that can be trained and the last I heard about what was going on in this field the investigators were trying to get a their hands on an MRI, probably at CalTech, so that they could see what was going on in the athlete/non-athlete's brain as they did the Landolt C."
"Now imagine that the superior ability to ascertain the position of the C is linked to a mind trained in a heuristic or set of heuristics that simplifies all cognitive processing attached to the issue. When the opening is up, jab; when it is down, cover; when it is to the left, throw a cross; when it is to the right, shoot in for a body lock. You can see where this is going---there is no real "decision" being made in the sense of someone weighing up a set of options and concluding that one is the way to go. You just have one option, really, linked to the position of the C at that moment.

Re: Hick's Law. This one doesn't reflect the way that human being usually makes on-the-fly decisions, and it is considered, perhaps unfairly, a bit of a joke in my line of work. The brain is radial in its inputs and non-linear in its outputs, and Hick's Law tries to simplify it. It comes into play when someone is looking at a brand new menu or trying to choose which forum of a new website they want to visit. The more similar the choices, the more the brain has to spend time going over nuances and trying to make a perfect fit."

vasch_ro

and the prize for the most consistently longest post's goes to.........

dlofnep

Musashi, I like you - But we need to really work on this post truncating.

Naos

Im going to the humour forum..