Exorcizing the Ghost of Mental Imagery

Abstract

To summarize, if we speak only about the information available in an object or a data structure -- and forget for now that we have mental lives at all, concerning ourselves only with our performance capacities -- it seems clear that array representations are merely another form of symbolic information. Are they likely to be the only form of internal representation, or the main one, that explains our visual and spatial capacities? I think not; I think tasks like Shepard & Cooper's (1982) ``mental rotation'' may be better accounted for by internal representations that do not turn transducer projections into numbers at all, but preserve them in analog form, one that is physically invertible by an analog transformation that is one-to-one with the transducer projection (to some subsensory and subcognitive level of neural granularity). In other words, I agree with Glasgow that it is a matter of preserving information in the internal representation, but I am not persuaded that arrays are the form the preserved information takes (see Camberlain & Barlow 1982; Jeannerod 1994).