Fundamental Aspects of Cognitive Representation

This chapter was born of an ill-defined but definite feeling that we, as cognitive psychologists, do not really understand our concepts of representation. We propose them, talk about them, argue about them, and try to obtain evidence in support of them, but we do not understand them in any fundamental sense. Anyone who has attempted to read the literature related to cognitive representation quickly becomes confused – and with good reason. The field is obtuse, poorly defined, and embarrassingly disorganized. Among the most popular terms, one finds the following: visual codes, verbal codes, spatial codes, physical codes, name codes, image codes, analog representations, digital representations, propositional…