ABSTRACT
Brian Smith offered a nice thought experiment to probe the nature of representations implicated in the sort of tracking behavior that von Hofsten describes: the case of super-sunflowers. Specifically, information may influence the location, number, or class of attractors and repellers in the system's dynamics by modulating the state variables or parameters of the system. At a minimum, a representation can serve to guide behavior appropriately in the absence of information from the environment. A stronger sense of representation holds that these internal entities can become detached from the environmental conditions that originally produced them and be used to think about the world off-line. In her work on the development of balance control, Karen Adolph also portrays the problem as similar to learning a new set of tasks or a new problem space.
