Individual Growth in Competence.

This paper presents the second study in a series that has been designed to manifest the emergence of consciousness and to measure developed competence. Its major aim has been to demonstrate that an invariant formulation of the Agent-action-Objective model and an analysis of it's a-O kinematics have the capacity to reproduce contour similarity over time. Within the studied evolutionary-developmental context, the biokinetics of the discovered AaO-mechanism has governed the synthesizing of information. Through the design of a single-subject experiment, it has been possible to demonstrate individual variations in growth as changes in complexity. When the two participating students are compared, obvious differences in their perspectives and consequently in their attractor spaces become apparent. Based on coordinated structural invariance, it has been possible to show that the convoluted spaces of the student who has followed the analytic-descriptive approach is concerned with the concrete level of the tested story. On the other hand, the student who is following a synthetic-reflective strategy seems to concentrate mainly on the symbolic level of the tested materials. Thus, from a developmental point of view, it has been possible to demonstrate that the AaO-mechanism is tracing embodied growth, which becomes manifest in the differences of the students' ability to adapt to the main idea of the given story. (Contains 8 figures and 14 references.) (Author/SLD)