ABSTRACT
When a person has to process a set of locations that are encompassed within a structure, he/she can think about a location in more than one way. For example it is possible to remember the location of a star both in terms of its location in the sky, or in terms of its position within a constellation. Structured patterns provide redundancy, allowing each part of a stimulus to be predicted from the other parts. Redundancy can be useful at both encoding and retrieval (Schumann-Hengsteler, Strobl, & Zoelch, 2004). The trace system resulting from a well-organized pattern is assumed to be more stable than that arising from a chaotic array and hence less subject to the effects of trace decay or interference (Koffka, 1935). Attneave (1954) demonstrated that various Gestalt factors including symmetry, good continuation, and other forms of regularity can all be considered to reflect redundancy that can be quantified accordingly within the framework of information theory. In particular, redundancy is a characteristic of symmetry, the mathematical definition of which is: the exact reflection of form on opposite sides of a dividing line or plane.
