heterogeneity of mental representation: Ending the imagery debate

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 112; no. 33; pp. 10089 - 10092
• Main Authors: Pearson, Joel, Stephen M. Kosslyn
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States National Academy of Sciences 18.08.2015; National Acad Sciences
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Biological Sciences; Brain - physiology; Cognition & reasoning; Heterogeneity; 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; imagery debate; mental codes; working memory; artificial intelligence; mental imagery
• ISSN: 0027-8424; 1091-6490; 1091-6490
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1504933112

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.