Theory Revision and Redescription

Abstract

Children acquire complex relational representations of the world. Explaining the acquisition of these representations has been a significant challenge for theories of cognitive development. Recent work suggests that two processes, theory revision and redescription, operate in an iterative, complementary fashion to produce new representations. Given a novel situation, children use theory revision to generate a candidate relational structure and can modify that structure in response to error. Redescription detects regularities created through successful use of that structure in interaction with the environment; these regularities are consolidated into new representations, which are then available to the theory-revision process. The complementary nature of these processes is illustrated by recent work on representational change in a gear-system task and in arithmetic concepts. Theory revision and redescription occupy different, but mutually supportive, niches in knowledge acquisition.