Representation-hungry information-processing systems maintain complex internal states and perform “offline” computations, which are detached from the present environment. This is a key assumption of the traditional model of cognition, which assumes information processing is linear: the brain takes in sensory data, performs a complex computation to solve a problem, and instructs the body to take an action (@1999clarkEmbodied).
Alternatively, a representation-hungry problem is one that “requires sufficient internal structure to mediate between perception and action” to solve (@2025icardResource).