The Nature of Mental Imagery

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses two different approaches for understanding mental imagery as put forth by Stephen Kosslyn and Z.W. Pylyshyn, explaining that Kosslyn's more traditional view of mental image is pictorial or depictive while Zenon Pylyshyn argues that imagery is prepositional. The paper describes the empirical support for Kosslyn's theory as well as the criticisms of his theory, focusing primarily on Pylyshyn's criticism of Kosslyn's theory. The paper then elaborates on Pylyshyn's theory of mental imagery, pointing out that Pylyshyn's theory of mental imagery is not as accepted as Kosslyn's because what Pylyshyn is offering amounts to more of a rebuttal of Kosslyn's theory than an actual organized, principled theory of its own.

From the Paper:

"The central defining feature of Cognitive Psychology is the idea of representation (Tye 1991). All of cognitive science is built upon the premise that certain naturally evolved things in the world (namely neuronal states in the human head) have come to "refer to", "stand for", "mean", or represent certain features or facts of the natural world that are external to the head, and namely, the organism in general. Assuming this, one wants to elucidate the nature of how this is accomplished. How can a spongy, electrical mass of gray tissue represent all of one's knowledge and beliefs, one's hopes and fears, one's states of emotions and pain, and lastly, one's phenomenal experience of the world."

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