heterogeneity of mental representation: Ending the imagery debate

The possible ways that information can be represented mentally have been discussed often over the past thousand years. However, this issue could not be addressed rigorously until late in the 20th century. Initial empirical findings spurred a debate about the heterogeneity of mental representation: I...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2015-08, Vol.112 (33), p.10089-10092
Main Authors: Pearson, Joel, Stephen M. Kosslyn
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence
Biological Sciences
Brain - physiology
Cognition & reasoning
History of medicine
Human subjects
Humans
image analysis
Imagery (Psychotherapy)
imagery debate
Imagination - physiology
information
Information processing
Language
memory
Memory, Short-Term
mental codes
mental imagery
Models, Neurological
Neurons - physiology
PERSPECTIVE
Visual Perception
working memory
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Summary:The possible ways that information can be represented mentally have been discussed often over the past thousand years. However, this issue could not be addressed rigorously until late in the 20th century. Initial empirical findings spurred a debate about the heterogeneity of mental representation: Is all information stored in propositional, language-like, symbolic internal representations, or can humans use at least two different types of representations (and possibly many more)? Here, in historical context, we describe recent evidence that humans do not always rely on propositional internal representations but, instead, can also rely on at least one other format: depictive representation. We propose that the debate should now move on to characterizing all of the different forms of human mental representation.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1504933112