PSY270H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Symbol Grounding Problem, Mental Chronometry, Descriptive Knowledge
21 Mar 2019
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Document Summary
One of the earliest debates in psychology concerns how information is represented in our minds. Imagery is a mental representation of something that isn"t currently present. An image resembles whatever it is that it represents. Tend to assume imagery is visual but we have imagery in other modalities too. Different than symbolic representation which is an arbitrary mental representation of a concept. Symbolic representation is arbitrary, no similarity to its reference, unlike imagery which is representative. Ex: the word dog , we know what it represents, it has one referent, but, it in no way represents that referent. The word dog doesn"t look like a dog, sound like a dog, etc. , while imagery represents what a dog looks like, what petting it feels like, etc. Can be abstract concept knowledge imagery/symbolic representation dichotomy is described by paivio"s dual-code theory. Thoughts can be represented in 2 ways: Everything can be represented verbally but not everything can be represented as an image.
