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How does new information get stored in a child's mind? It has been argued that there are several different ways. One is via innate specification as the result of evolutionary process. For this environmental input is necessary to act as a trigger for the organism to select one parameter or ciruit over others. However, when the innate prediposition is specified merely as a bias or skeletal outline, then it is likely that the environment acts as much more than a trigger, it actually influences the subsequent structure of the brain via a rich epigenetic interaction between the mind and the physical/sociocultural environment. Another is when a child fails to reach a goal and has to take into account information from the phyaical environment. Also another is generated when has to represent information directly from a linguistic statement. Karmiloff-Smith's claim is that a specifically human way to gain knowledge is for the mind to exploit internally the information that it has already stored by redescribing its representaions.
The Representational Redescrition model attempts to account for the way in which children's representaions become progresively more manipulable and flexible for the emergence of conscious access to knowledge and for theory building. Representational redescription is a process by which implicit information in the mind subsequently becomes explicit knowledge to the mind.