Mental imagery:

Imagery Debate: Is mental imagery a digital or analogue form of representation?

• Articulate and illustrate with examples the distinction between digital and analogue
forms of representation.

✓ Digital: musical notation, sentences, symbols; A different family of representations uses a

symbolic relation between an object and its representation. their fundamental property is
they represent information indirectly. All data representations used in modern computer
systems descend from this family.

✓ Analogue: pictures, maps, photographs; One way to represent information is to create and
sustain a direct analogy between the information and the physical representation of the
information.

• Articulate the relevance of this distinction to the guiding conception of the mind in
classical cognitive science.

✓ The classical computational theory of the mind suggests that many important mental
processes (e.g., reasoning, decision-making, and problem solving) are computations similar
to those executed by Turing machines. Thus, the mind uses a symbolic digital form of
representation.

• Articulate some of the arguments against analogue modes of representation in human

thought.

✓ Jerry Fodor postulated the language of thought (Mentalese) which means thinking occurs in
a mental language centered around 2 key phenomena:

- Systematicity: An ability to entertain one thought is correlated with an ability to entertain

others. For example, someone who can entertain the thought that John loves Mary can also
entertain the thought that Mary loves John.

- Productivity: Neglecting incidental limits on lifespan and memory capacity, humans can
entertain a potential infinity of thoughts.

what the langue of thought didn't solve is that some complex mental symbols may more
closely resemble non-propositional representations such as shapes,maps, diagrams, or
pictures.
• Articulate and explain some of the evidence in favour of it.

✓ Theory of spatial representation by Stephen Kosslyn implies that mental imagery is not only
a digital form of representation but it can also be an analogues one. And he tried to find
evidence by constructing an experimental support using “image scanning” .

✓ image scanning done by Kosslyn in 1970s, Refers to the example of the mental
representation of a line drawings such as a flower, ship, and airplane. The reaction time of
the subjects that stored information as a language-like increased than of those who stored
information as a visual image, which indicates, that we primarily create a mental picture of
scenes while trying to solve small cognitive tasks. Interestingly, this visual ability can be
observed also with congenitally blind!, so it could be concluded that there is a deeper
encoded system that has access to more than the visual input.