When psychological studies of mental imagery revived in the late 1960s, arguments centered upon the question of whether mental imagery should be distinguished from language as a separate system of mental representation. Although mental imagery was repeatedly shown to facilitate word retrieval, this did not convince many psychologists that mental imagery and language are different kinds of repre...

Mental rotation and number representation have both been studied widely, but although mental rotation has been linked to higher-level mathematical skills, to date it has not been shown whether mental rotation ability is linked to the most basic mental representation and processing of numbers. To investigate the possible connection between mental rotation abilities and numerical representation, ...

Definition The Supplantation Effect describes a function of media that conducts a mental operation by an external representation. If a learner is not able to accomplish a mental, covert operation internally and an external representation is able to replace this process, supplantation occurs. External representation supporting supplantation can either be static representations like graphs or dyn...

A growing literature shows that even the symbolic presence of an attachment figure facilitates the regulation of negative affect triggered by external stressors. Yet, in daily life, pernicious stressors are often internally generated--recalling an upsetting experience reliably increases negative affect, rumination, and susceptibility to physical and psychological health problems. The present re...

This paper focuses on the impact of users’ mental model for the performance when interacting with mobile devices. Investigating the interrelation between the quality of the mental model and the performance, users had to accomplish standard applications with cell phones (study 1) and a PDA (study 2). Navigation routes were individually analyzed and the respective effectiveness and efficiency of ...

This paper uses cognitive fit theory to analyze the problem solving process in spreadsheet analyses. Cognitive fit theory proposes the formation of mental representation as a part of the problem solving process. However, there is little research examining mental representation, which is a key concept in cognitive fit theory. This study examines the formation of mental representation and propose...

Our contribution aims at individuating a valid philosophical strategy for a fruitful confrontation between human and artificial representation. The ground for this theoretical option resides in the necessity to find a solution that overcomes, on the one side, strong AI (i.e. Haugeland) and, on the other side, the view that rules out AI as explanation of human capacities (i.e. Dreyfus). We try t...

The article demonstrates the inadequacy in the traditional approach of psychology to the description of products of mental representation of perception. The principles of objective representation of subjective experience (principles of “mental map” construction) contain a whole range of contradictions. We propose a consistent mathematical description of the “mental map” based on psychosemiotic ...

Objectives: Recent research has indicated that performers’mental representation of a motor skill changes over the course of learning. In the present study, we sought to ascertain whether the type of instructions (instructions that emphasize either an internal or external focus of attention) influences the development of skill representation during motor learning. Design: Participants without go...