Manyphilosophers and psychologists have attempted to elucidate the nature of mental representation by appealing to notions like isomorphism or abstract structural resemblance. The ‘structural representations’ that these theorists champion are said to count as representations by virtue of functioning as internalmodels of distal systems. In his 2007 book, Representation Reconsidered, William Rams...

Using the theory of social representations, this small-scale, qualitative study considers whether mental illness is differentiated by a lay population. Three focus groups (total n=17), using students were conducted and content analysed, along with a random sample of articles from two British newspapers, ‘The Mirror’ and ‘The Daily Telegraph’. A strong social representation of unified ‘mental il...

It is often intuitively assumed that disconnected image fragments result in a representation of separate objects. When objects are partly occluded, disconnected image fragments can still result in a representation of a single object, based on visual completion. In a simultaneous matching task, displays showing one object, partly occluded objects, or two objects were compared with each other. Wh...

A common presupposition in the concepts literature is that concepts constitute a singular natural kind. If, on the contrary, concepts split into more than one kind, this literature needs to be recast in terms of other kinds of mental representation. We offer two new arguments that concepts, in fact, divide into different kinds: (a) concepts split because different kinds of mental representation...

Mental rotation in the congenitally blind was investigated with a haptic letter-judgment task. Blind subjects and blindfolded, sighted subjects were presented a letter in some orientation between 0° to 300° from upright and timed while they judged whether it was a normal or mirror-image letter. Both groups showed an increasing response time with the stimulus’s departure from upright; this resul...

Advanced age-group swimmers and their coaches try to optimize their individual swimming technique. Therefore the stroke distance is often mentioned as a criteria. If swimmers cover more distance stroke by stroke, their movements under water are more efficient. The base of a successful motion sequence is a well-structured mental representation. Mental representation can be visualized by using sp...

It is commonly accepted that the mental representation and processing of number and of space are tightly linked. This is evident from studies showing relations between math ability and visuospatial skill. Also, math instruction and education rely strongly on visuospatial tools and strategies. The dominant explanation for these number-space interactions is that the mental representation of numbe...

Accounts of mental content rooted in asymmetric dependence hold, crudely speaking, that the content of a mental representation is the cause of that representation on which all its other causes depend.1 To speak somewhat less crudely, such accounts, hereafter “AD accounts”, hold 1) that (a) any nomic relations which obtain between, on the one hand, a mental representation and, on the other hand,...