Information Compression as a Unifying Principle in Human Learning, Perception, and Cognition

Figure 1

A schematic representation of the way two instances of the pattern “INFORMATION” in a body of raw data may be unified to form a single “unified” pattern or “chunk” of information, below the “raw data”. Lower again in the figure, “w62” is added to the unified chunk as a relatively short identifier or “code”. The lowest part of the figure shows how the raw data may be compressed by replacing each instance of “INFORMATION” with a copy of the short identifer. Adapted with permission from Figure 2.3 in [1].