Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Notions of entropy and uncertainty are fundamental tomany domains, ranging from the philosophy of science tophysics. One important application is to quantify theexpected usefulness of possible experiments (or questions ortests). Many different entropy models could be used;different models do not in general lead to the sameconclusions about which tests (or experiments) are mostvaluable. It is often unclear whether this is due to differenttheoretical and practical goals or are merely due to historicalaccident. We introduce a unified two-parameter family ofentropy models that incorporates a great deal of entropies asspecial cases. This family of models offers insight intoheretofore perplexing psychological results, and generatespredictions for future research.