In everyday life people interact with a dynamic environment. We coordinate our movements with the movements of others when we drive, walk on a crowded street, dance with a partner, or engage in just about any interaction with other people. Even our encounters with the inanimate environment typically result in dynamic events; we move furniture, cook food, type documents. What is the basis of our motor competence in these daily interactions with the world? The proposed research continues to pursue the notion that our competence depends on our ability to anticipate the immediate future, and further that we accomplish this anticipation by virtue of dynamic mental representations (Freyd, 1987) in which time falls inevitably forward from the dynamic present (Freyd, in press-b). Much of the proposed experimental research is designed to uncover the structure of dynamic representations. For instance, experiments using the phenomenon of representational momentum will probe the temporal nature of mental representation. In these experiments subjects are asked to remember the final state of an implied transformation; typically their memories are shifted forward. In related experiments internalized knowledge of physical laws will be investigated. Other experiments will investigate dynamic memory shifts for purely static stimuli, including static art (for which dynamic memory shifts may underlie aesthetic excitement). The empirical results from these experiments will be used toward developing a theory of mental representation that can account for our perceptual and motor competence. The theory will be constructed at multiple levels of analysis: the cognitive, neurological, and also the social. This last level of analysis draws on the concept of shareability (Freyd, 1983c, in press-a). Shareability predicts that shared knowledge structures have been transformed from private (e.g. perceptual) representations such that information is stored categorically instead of continuously. Given that humans are an extremely intellectually social species, the shareability of information may have profound impact on how we represent the world. Experiments are proposed to test the hypothesis that dynamic representations are not directly shareable, perhaps not even consciously accessible, and that the representational demands of motor competence are thus at odds with those of communication. It is hoped that the integrated theory will lead to a new conceptualization of knowledge representation, dynamic information, perception and motor behavior, communication of information, and how these factors interrelate at the neural, cognitive, and social levels. This new understanding should have implications for understanding normal human competencies, and also for understanding some of the incompetencies in motor behavior, perception, and communication that we observe when minds or brains are diseased.
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