[Arun2009]

I myself have thought quite a bit about the better representation issue.

I once read somewhere that all human concepts are fundamentally associative in nature. If you see the halftone image of an apple, you don't have to work through pixel by pixel to figure out the concept, "apple". The concept apple with its related features naturally occurs to you.

Taking this further to learning, it would seem that we all go through a stage where our knowledge is of a deliberate, serial nature and once a certain degree of habituation is reached, the knowledge gets coded enough to be associative in nature. Consider solving problems in Mathematics - initially, we all have to consciously do a state-space search to figure out the right method to solve the problem. To expert problem solvers, however, the method to solve the problem becomes immediately apparent just from the patterns in the problem. Ditto for chess, etc.

Lets call knowledge that's serial in nature second-order knowledge and the knowledge that's associative, first-order knowledge. I think there's immense promise in investigating whether the transformation from second-order to first-order can be made systematic. I.e., consider learning as a new subject in itself. I am pretty sure that research has been done on this though.