The first time you eat sushi, you take that experience as your prototypical sushi-eating experience. The next time, you expect the experience to be roughly the same as the first. You use your past experience to provide expectations (i.e., predictions) for what your future will be like. As you gain experience, those expectations which turn out to be always true get embedded into generalized memory structures which capture the commonalties.
Expectation-building then is simply the application of generalized memory structures based on similarities among the events we experience. In the sushi example, these structures give you predictions that you can use when thinking about sushi. Unless you sit back and ponder about your sushi-eating experience, these structures will contain little more than knowledge about the typical sequence of events in a sushi-eating case and the typical outcomes from such cases.
Where am I in the content of the book?
