Making Prediction in an Uncertain World
Environmental Structure and Cognitive Maps
This paper is extremely dense and we will read it over
the course of two classes. For today read up to the
section Visual Structure - Gateways. Much
of the ground here should be pretty familiar. What
is somewhat new is that we are going to start looking
at larger structures. So far we have focussed almost
exclusively on the active symbol. Starting today we
will look at how active symbols fit together to form
cognitive maps. The argument in the paper is that
a key role of cognitive structure is for making effective
predictions in the face of uncertainty. The mechanisms
for doing this ought to look an awful lot like the
mechanisms for building active symbols; the nature
of the problem is the same, the temporal mechanics
are just slightly different.