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Chapter 6 - Accessing the Remainders of Mental Representations and Filling in the Gaps

Prediction Involves Preactivation and Pattern Completion

from Part II - Psychological Theories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2025

Falk Huettig
Falk Huettig
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
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Summary

Prediction is the preactivation of likely upcoming stored mental representations. Pattern completion is the related theory that prediction involves the multiscale completion of patterns of the future. Prediction in pattern completion ignores the presence of gaps and incomplete structures by ‘jumping to conclusions’ about the complete pattern. Preactivation and the completion or continuation of encountered patterns in a forward direction are explicit descriptions of how predictive processing arises in the mind.

Keywords

mental representationsspreading activationprimingpreactivationpredictionpattern completion
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Chapter
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Looking Ahead
The New Science of the Predictive Mind
 , pp. 46 - 59
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Further Reading

Bharucha, J. J., & Stoeckig, K. (1986). Reaction time and musical expectancy: Priming of chords. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 12(4), 403–410.Google ScholarPubMed
Falandays, J. B., Nguyen, B., & Spivey, M. J. (2021). Is prediction nothing more than multi-scale pattern completion of the future? Brain Research, 1768, Article 147578.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huettig, F., Audring, J., & Jackendoff, R. (2022). A parallel architecture perspective on pre-activation and prediction in language processing. Cognition, 224, Article 105050.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

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