Successive Refinement and Coarsening of the Information Bottleneck

We discuss two models for two central issues appearing inconjunction with cognitive processing. One is the ability toincorporate fresh information to already learnt models; the other oneis moving to a better understanding of what happens when information``trickles'' through many layers of a cognitive processing pipeline. We do so by investigating formal properties of the Information Bottleneck method: namely how it relates to successive refinement, and successive coarsening of information.