Mental representation

A mental representation (or cognitive representation), in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality or its abstractions.[1][2]

Mental representation is the mental imagery of things that are not actually present to the senses.[3] In contemporary philosophy, specifically in fields of metaphysics such as philosophy of mind and ontology, a mental representation is one of the prevailing ways of explaining and describing the nature of ideas and concepts.

Mental representations (or mental imagery) enable representing things that have never been experienced as well as things that do not exist.[4] Our brains and mental imageries allow us to imagine things have either never happened or are impossible and do not exist. Although visual imagery is more likely to be recalled, mental imagery may involve representations in any of the sensory modalities, such as hearing, smell, or taste. Stephen Kosslyn proposes that images are used to help solve certain types of problems. We are able to visualize the objects in question and mentally represent the images to solve it.[4]

Mental representations also allow people to experience things right in front of them—however, the process of how the brain interprets and stores the representational content is debated.[5]

  1. ^ Morgan, Alex (2014). "Representations Gone Mental" (PDF). Synthese. 191 (2): 213–44. doi:10.1007/s11229-013-0328-7. S2CID 18194442.
  2. ^ Marr, David (2010). Vision. A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262514620.
  3. ^ Mckellar, Peter (1957). Imagination and thinking: A psychological analysis. Oxford, England.
  4. ^ a b Robert J. Sternberg (2009). Cognitive Psychology. Cengage Learning. ISBN 9780495506294.
  5. ^ Pearson, Joel; Kosslyn, Stephen M. (2015-08-18). "The heterogeneity of mental representation: Ending the imagery debate". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 112 (33): 10089–10092. doi:10.1073/pnas.1504933112. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 4547292. PMID 26175024.