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AbstractThe public's approval of Congress is at an all time low. The parties seem to have taken the legislative process hostage for their own electoral gain. Whereas traditional arguments about congressional dysfunction focus on polarized voting coalitions or outputs – particularly legislation – in this article we highlight congressional information processing and how it has changed in this highly partisan era. By coding congressional hearings according to the kind of information on which they focus, we find that members of Congress are receiving one‐sided information to a greater degree and are spending less time learning about potential solutions. We use these results to make numerous recommendations for improving how Congress gathers its information.

This is the second volume on "Optical Information Processing" within the scope of the US-USSR Science Cooperation Program co­ sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and the USSR Acad­ emy of Sciences Siberian Branch. Volume I was published in 1976, also by Plenum Press, and con­ tained the papers presented by a group of US and USSR scientists at the First US-USSR Science Cooperation Seminar "Optical Informa­ tion Processing" held at the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D. C. from 16 to 20 June 1975. The seminar was followed by a series of visits to US scientific research laboratories and universities, to which the visiting USSR scientists were escorted bv Dr. W. E. Kock and Dr. G. W. Stroke. The visits included Bell Laboratories, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory and M. I. T. , as reported in detail in the FOREWORD of Volume I. Volume II now presents the papers presented by another group of US and USSR scientists, some having participated in the first seminar: this series of papers was presented at the Second US-USSR Science Cooperation Seminar on "Optical Information Processing" held at the USSR Academy of Sciences Siberian Branch Institute of Auto­ mation and Electrometry in the famous "science city" of Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk in Siberia, USSR from 10 to 16 July 1976.

Using two criteria, time required to react to the stimulus and performance on a simple tracking task, subjects were exposed to various levels of rate of information presentation, the number of channels through which it was presented, and the physical location and arrangement of the information media. Performance as measured by both criteria dropped as the rate and number of channels increased. Performance was generally better on more compact media arrangements and those channels more centrally located. There were some differences between criteria in these areas, however.

Decision-makers often face limited liability and thus know that their loss will be bounded. We study how limited liability affects the behavior of an agent who chooses how much information to acquire and process in order to take a good decision. We find that an agent facing limited liability processes less information than an agent with unlimited liability. The informational gap between the two agents is larger in bad times than in good times and when information is more costly to process.