Do you know the Representational Redescription Model?
It is a cognitive model created by professor and researcher in neurocognition Annette Karmiloff-Smith. This model tries to explain how our mind operates when obtaining and transforming knowledge.
What is the Representational Redescription Model?
The Representational Redescription Model is a model proposed by neuroscientist researcher Annette Karmiloff-Smith. It is a model of cognitive development, which offers a vision in relation to the cognitive aspects that develop during the acquisition and development of human language.
What the Representational Redescription Model promotes is to establish new systems of relationships between the different representations that we have, at the mental level, of reality (of ourselves, of the context, circumstances, relationships, objects, etc.).
The model also defends the importance of making explicit two elements that are part of our mental representations: the object or attitude, on the one hand, and the agent of representation, on the other.
Characteristics
Regarding its characteristics, one of the functions of the Representational Redescription Model is to change the person's vision of the world, as well as the theories, ideas or knowledge that the person has acquired about his / her surroundings.
Through his model, Karmiloff-Smith deviates from the structuralist tradition and opts for an approach where the key element is hypotheses; According to Karmiloff-Smith, hypotheses are theories in action that allow us to formulate, define (and redefine) our way of thinking.
His model gives great importance to the vital stage of childhood; Specifically, the theory on which the Representational Redescription Model is based establishes that children's mental activity becomes unique thanks to the process of making certain implicit representations explicit, through different phases where an internal reorganization occurs in the mind. of the child.
Theoretical bases
At a theoretical level, the bases of the Representational Redescription Model are: innatism and constructivism.
Innatism is a doctrine that states that certain types of knowledge are innate (not acquired through experience or learning). For its part, constructivism is a pedagogical trend that suggests that we are building our own knowledge, progressively and actively.
On the other hand, the Representational Redescription Model also takes the development perspective, without neglecting the innate (more biological) part of every human being.
Importance of explicit learning
In the Representational Redescription Model, the concept of "explicit learning" becomes very relevant. This type of learning involves a restructuring of the knowledge we have in a given field.
In this way, the fact of making implicit knowledge explicit would be carried out from the redescription of said knowledge in a new theoretical framework.
On the other hand, we must bear in mind that in any process of acquiring knowledge, whatever its type, we are greatly influenced by culture; in this way, when we acquire new knowledge (or representation system), we do so through cultural systems that influence us.
Representational redescription
To better understand how the Representational Redescription Model works, we will know what this last concept consists of (representational redescription; RR).
Representational redescription is a way of obtaining knowledge through our mind; it is a question of this one exploiting, in an internal way, the information that it already has stored, through a process of redescription of the mental representations. In other words; it is about re-representing (redescription) the representations we have of things, in different formats.
In this way, through this process, an implicit representation becomes knowledge. In addition, this process also allows us to build our "I-agent", a concept of psychotherapy that consists of the identity that we are building at the cognitive level.
Knowledge representation levels
According to Annette Karmiloff-Smith, we can find up to four different levels through which we represent knowledge, and on which the model is based. These levels are:
1. Implicit level
These are representations of a procedural nature that would not be accessible to other parts of the cognitive system. These types of implicit representations are interpreted in connectionist terms.
2. Explicit level
They are the representations that become symbolic representations (“information packages”), and would be stored in our memory in a “compact” way. They are both explicit and implicit; explicit because they are in our memory, and implicit because we cannot report them.
Both these representations and the previous ones (implicit level, 1), are effective in situations where an automatic, fast and immediate response is required.
3. Explicit level
It includes that information packaged in our representation system in a stable and durable way. In other words, it is the information that we have in our memory. This information can be retrieved and updated through new representations.
4. Explicit level
Finally, the explicit level of the representational redescription model encompasses the true explicit representations; that is, they are the ones that, in addition to being available, are accessible to others on an explicit level (consciously).
Both these representations and the previous ones (explicit level, 2) are those that allow new situations to be addressed, where the response required (or needed) is not automatic, but flexible.
Processes that operate and learning
It is worth mentioning two processes that take place within the Representational Redescription Model. These processes are, in fact, two complementary directions that our learning takes:
1. Procedure
The procedure process is a gradual process, which allows our mind to make, from existing knowledge, a more automatic (and at the same time, less accessible) type of knowledge. An example of learning that we carry out from this process is learning to solve a Rubik's cube.
2. Explanation
In the second process, knowledge becomes more and more accessible to our minds every month; In this case, we are talking about explicitly representing implicit information, as far as procedural representations are concerned. An example of this would be learning to play the piano.
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