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Role Of Representations In Cognition

Q: What roles do representations play in learning?

The philosophical theories regarding the nature of learning process revolved around the idea that the process associated stimulus traces that connected the internal representations of stimuli that repeatedly occur together in time and space. The term representation refers to something that symbolizes or presents likeness of something to the mind or senses.

According to the author, the term is used in its mathematical sense. He says that learning should be studied in the framework of representation. Studying animals, he developed a framework that linked quantities computed and stored by the nervous system representing aspects of the animal's environment to the animal's relationship with that environment. The brain is said to represent an aspect of the environment when there is a functioning isomorphism between an aspect of the environment and a brain process that adapts the animal's behavior to it.

Again he uses the mathematical definition of isomorphism saying that they are formal correspondences between distinct systems of mathematical study; often with one being an object not well understood and another more richly developed system. And a functioning isomorphism is one in which the capacity of one system to represent another is put to use. This system, he puts to use in order to study learning in animals. He says that the representation of space and time is crucial. Representation of space is through representation of the geometric relationships among surfaces in the animal's environment and its momentary geometric relationship to them and representation of time is through representation of time at which events have occurred and the representation of temporal intervals. This means that there is an orderly mapping from entities in the environment to entities in the nervous system. These neuro-physiological entities enter the neuro-physiological processes that correspond in their formal characteristics...