vison Flashcards
o Discussion on whether imagery is spatial or propositional.
o Reference to Kosna and Pilison’s work on perception.
The spatial theory, or analog theory, suggests that mental imagery is like perception: it is spatially organized and resembles actual physical objects or scenes. When we visualize something, we are mentally “seeing” it in a way that reflects its physical properties, such as size, distance, and shape.
Image Scanning Experiments (Kosslyn): In Kosslyn’s famous studies, participants were asked to imagine objects, such as a map, and mentally “scan” from one point to another. The time it took to mentally scan between two points was proportional to the actual distance between them, suggesting that mental imagery preserves spatial relationships.
The propositional theory, on the other hand, argues that mental imagery is not truly spatial but instead is encoded in a propositional or symbolic format. According to this view, mental representations are more abstract and do not retain the specific details of spatial properties. Instead, they consist of descriptive propositions that convey relationships and meaning rather than visual or spatial form.
Criticism of Spatial Scanning: Proponents of the propositional theory argue that the results of spatial scanning tasks could be explained by propositional knowledge about relationships (e.g., “A is next to B”) rather than by actual mental images that mirror spatial layout. Pylyshyn
o Difference between deductive and representational imagery.
Deductive imagery refers to the use of mental images to reason logically or deductively through a problem.
Representational imagery, on the other hand, refers to the use of mental images to represent objects, scenes, or ideas in a way that mirrors their appearance or structure in the real world.
