Human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive. Reflective though is the ability to think deeply about things, to question and examine every statement. The cognitive age of humans started when we used sounds, gestures and symbols to refer to objects, things and concepts. The powers of cognition come from abstraction and representation: the ability to representing perceptions, experience, and thoughts in some medium other than that in which they have occurred, abstracted away from irrelevant details (like reading summaries).
A good representation captures the essential elements of an event, deliberately leaving out the rest. A representation is never the same as the thing being represented, else there would be no advantage to using one. Getting the abstractions right allows everyone to concentrate upon the essentials. A representational system has two essential ingredients. (1) The represented world, the stuff to be represented and (2) the representing world, the set of symbols that represent something in (1).
Representations should (a) Capture the important, critical features of the represented world while ignoring the irrelevant; (b) be appropriate for the person, enhancing the process of interpretation; and (c) be appropriate for the task, enhancing the ability to make judgments, to discover relevant regularities and structures.
There are many kinds of artifacts. Experiential artifacts provide ways to experience and act upon the world (e.g. a telescope) while reflective artifacts provide ways to modify and act upon representations. Matching representation to the task showed an example of playing "15" and matching it with a magic square and then to tic-tac-toe.
Naturalness Principle: Experiential cognition is aided when the properties of the representation match the properties of the thing being represented.
Perceptual Principle: Perceptual and spatial representations are more natural and therefore to be preferred over non-perceptual, non-spatial representations, but only if the mapping between the representation and what it stands for is natural -- analogous to the real perceptual and spatial environment.
Page Last Modified: 07/10/2025 17:55:36 |