Representation is a core theoretical construct for cognitive science and nearly all branches of psychology. It captures the remarkable ability of many organisms to apparently extract and internalize information about the external environment. Humans and many other species clearly predict the future, based on their past. The development of representations allows us to do so, thereby opening the door to cognition. The proposed research investigates the broad hypothesis that representations are emergent from the dynamics of the cognitive system (a system that includes brain and body). On this account, representations, like other structures, emerge to keep the system organized - without organization the organism ceases to function. This seemingly non-controversial idea, that representations emerge to increase order within the system, suggests that principles of self-organization from nonlinear dynamics may apply. In nonlinear dynamics, new structures emerge as the entropy (i.e., disorder) within an open system increases. The new structures function to dissipate that entropy, thus maintaining the system's integrity by decreasing its internal entropy.
The project addresses the dynamics underlying three major phenomena in representational change: induction, hypothesis testing, and transfer. The studies combine motion-tracking technology and methods for analyzing over-time data to predict the onset of new representations in children aged 3.5 - 12 years. The project builds on previous work with children and adults in a gear-system paradigm; participants are asked to predict the turning direction of the final gear in the series, given the turning direction of the driving gear. Previous research showed that participants: a) induce a new representation during this task based on their own actions; b) change their representations via hypothesis testing; and c) transfer relations from a structurally analogous domain. The current work will investigate the changes in underlying dynamical organization of the system that give rise to these key aspects of representational change. The project will advance our understanding of knowledge acquisition and, therefore, has implications for children's learning. The research also has deep implications for theories within cognition science, because it bridges the current gap between dynamics and cognition.
