We start the first major section of the course. It is entitled "the unit of thought." Keep this in mind as you read today's readings. All of the papers are about properties of the unit of thought, or constraints on how it functions.

Stephen Kaplan is an environmental psychologist at the University of Michigan and essentially the founder of the field. The basic tenet of environmental psychology is that information processing is closely tied to the environment. In this chapter Kaplan looks at the demands placed on perception that occur in a hostile environment. Creatures without the ability to respond quickly to danger are unlikely to survive. As we have already seen in the Newell chapter, speed is not easily obtained by a system with slow neural hardware. Kaplan makes the case here that one way to obtain speed and accuracy is by utilizing experience efficiently.

The three chapters of Vehicles are really the core of the work. Their inclusion here may seem a little odd. But what Vehicles is all about is building complicated behaviors with simple building blocks. The building blocks described here are pretty much the same as in the brain. Try and think about how building "units of thought" out of such components, and what said units will end up looking like.

While not scientific, the McCloud material does a wonderful job of communicating some of the important things going on in our heads. This material is jam packed with important ideas that have been central in psychology going back to the Gestaltists. This article is about communicating, not just in comics, but in everything.