The traumatic origins of representation

The debate regarding representation is haunted by the fact that it takes place within a context of general suspicion whereby everything, it is claimed, is always representation. Such is the hurdle that Foucault identifies and Derrida attempts to elucidate in his debate with Heidegger, in which he takes issue with Heidegger’s critique of the “age of representation.” Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s account of the history of representation leads to a reconstruction that privileges the motifs of dissemination, of envoi (sending or dispatching). In art too, Derrida confronts Heidegger, this time with the aim of re-thinking the relationship between the work and what lies outside and beyond it. By framing the Derrida/Heidegger debate within a consideration of the Lascaux cave drawings, and by examining the positions of Girard, Bataille and Blanchot in relation to the question of the origins of art, it will be possible to re-draw the boundaries of representation insofar as they lie at the intersection between philosophy and art.     

The mental representation of causal conditional reasoning: mental models or causal models

In this paper, two experiments are reported investigating the nature of the cognitive representations underlying causal conditional reasoning performance. The predictions of causal and logical interpretations of the conditional diverge sharply when inferences involving pairs of conditionals—such as if P₁then Q and if P₂then Q—are considered. From a causal perspective, the causal direction of these conditionals is critical: are the P_icauses of Q; or symptoms caused byQ. The rich variety of inference patterns can naturally be modelled by Bayesian networks. A pair of causal conditionals where Q is an effect corresponds to a “collider” structure where the two causes (P_i) converge on a common effect. In contrast, a pair of causal conditionals where Q is a cause corresponds to a network where two effects (P_i) diverge from a common cause. Very different predictions are made by fully explicit or initial mental models interpretations. These predictions were tested in two experiments, each of which yielded data most consistent with causal model theory, rather than with mental models.     

The mental representation of countries

Three studies were conducted to describe adults' knowledge of the countries of the world. Undergraduates from a selective liberal arts college recognised nearly two-thirds of nations, and about one-third were produced in a free-recall task. The use of information related to countries' locations was an important determinant of order of recall. Contiguity in free-recall output, responses in a free-association task, and the prediction of recall from recognition also provided evidence of other relations between countries, including semantic and phonetic links and membership in groups of countries. The number of times a country was mentioned in the news was a consistent predictor of recognition and recall. The relative prosperity, population density, and geographic area of countries also influenced recall.     

The mental representation of countries

Three studies were conducted to describe adults’ knowledge of the countries of the world. Undergraduates from a selective liberal arts college recognised nearly two-thirds of nations, and about one-third were produced in a free-recall task. The use of information related to countries’ locations was an important determinant of order of recall. Contiguity in free-recall output, responses in a free-association task, and the prediction of recall from recognition also provided evidence of other relations between countries, including semantic and phonetic links and membership in groups of countries. The number of times a country was mentioned in the news was a consistent predictor of recognition and recall. The relative prosperity, population density, and geographic area of countries also influenced recall.     

Reasoning and mental representation

Four experiments exploring the effects of the coherence of a mental representation of material on reasoning performance are presented. Each employs a simple task that allows most subjects at some stage to solve the problem. We postulate that the crucial factor influencing performance is a unified representation of the material. In Experiment 1 we use an authorization of a kind familiar in daily life, and in Experiments 2, 3 and 4 we use sentences describing simple objects in different ways. In each case performance was enhanced when the material could be given a unified representation.     

The mental representation of knowledge acquired from maps

Recognition priming and distance estimation were used to investigate the mental representation of knowledge acquired from maps. In Experiment 1, recognition priming showed that cities close in route distance primed each other more than cities far in route distance, even when Euclidean distance was equated. Experiment 2 showed that this finding was robust and not an artifact of the way subjects learned the maps. Distance estimations in Experiment 1 supported the priming results. These results indicated that psychological distance in cognitive maps is primarily dependent on route distance rather than Euclidean distance.     

Surface construal and the mental representation of scenes

What distinguishes scenes from nonscenes? Photographs of objects on both naturalistic and blank backgrounds yielded boundary extension (BE: memory for unseen spatial expanse outside the picture's boundaries). However, line-drawn objects on blank backgrounds did not (Experiment 1). Perhaps the blank background was construed as depicting a real-world surface in the photograph condition but was construed as depicting nothing in the line-drawn condition. To change background construal, the authors used objects cut out of photographs; these were placed on blank backgrounds while viewers watched (Experiments 2 and 3). BE was eliminated. The authors propose that amodal continuation is a fundamental aspect of scene perception. However, not all pictures are scenes--only pictures construed as depicting a truncated view of a continuous world.     

Medieval theories of mental representation

Throughout most of the Middle ages, it was generally held that stored mental representations of perceived objects or events preserved the forms or species of such objects. This belief was consistent with a metaphor used by Plato. It was also consistent with the medieval belief that a number of cognitive processes took place in the ventricles of the brain and with the phenomenology of afterimages and imagination itself. In the 14th century, William of Ockham challenged this belief by claiming that mental representations are not stored but instead constructed in the basis of past learned experiences.     

The consequences of virtual embodiment for the mental representation of proximity

There is evidence that knowledge about space will reflect the details of how that space is experienced and how people interact with it. In two experiments we demonstrate that memory for items is spatially structured after their locations were learnt in a desktop virtual environment (DVE). The structure was measured using interitem priming of recognition. By comparison in Experiment 2, after the same layout had been learnt using a map display, there was no evidence of spatial structuring in memory. It is concluded that the limited view of space afforded by navigation through an environment, as contrasted with the overview afforded by a map, explains the observed differences in the spatial structuring of interitem associations. Navigation through an environment leads to spatial structuring in memory whereas using a map does not.     

The uses of mental imagery in athletics: An overview

This article surveys the extant literature on mental imagery as used in athletics for performance enhancement, arousal regulation, affective and cognitive modification, and rehabilitation. For each category of use, applications are discussed, an overview of the empirical and case-study research findings is presented, and the research is critiqued. A concluding section recommends directions for future research on uses of mental imagery in athletics.     

The mental representation of music notation: notational audiation

This study investigated the mental representation of music notation. Notational audiation is the ability to internally "hear" the music one is reading before physically hearing it performed on an instrument. In earlier studies, the authors claimed that this process engages music imagery contingent on subvocal silent singing. This study refines the previously developed embedded melody task and further explores the phonatory nature of notational audiation with throat-audio and larynx-electromyography measurement. Experiment 1 corroborates previous findings and confirms that notational audiation is a process engaging kinesthetic-like covert excitation of the vocal folds linked to phonatory resources. Experiment 2 explores whether covert rehearsal with the mind's voice also involves actual motor processing systems and suggests that the mental representation of music notation cues manual motor imagery. Experiment 3 verifies findings of both Experiments 1 and 2 with a sample of professional drummers. The study points to the profound reliance on phonatory and manual motor processing--a dual-route stratagem--used during music reading. Further implications concern the integration of auditory and motor imagery in the brain and cross-modal encoding of a unisensory input.     

The mental representation of ordinal sequences is spatially organized

In the domain of numbers the existence of spatial components in the representation of numerical magnitude has been convincingly demonstrated by an association between number magnitude and response preference with faster left- than right-hand responses for small numbers and faster right- than left-hand responses for large numbers (Dehaene, S., Bossini, S., & Giraux, P. (1993) The mental representation of parity and number magnitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 371-396). Because numbers convey not only real or integer meaning but also ordinal meaning, the question of whether non-numerical ordinal information is spatially coded naturally follows. While previous research failed to show an association between ordinal position and spatial response preference, we present two experiments involving months (Experiment 1) and letters (Experiment 2) in which spatial coding is demonstrated. Furthermore, the response-side effect was obtained with two different stimulus-response mappings. The association occurred both when ordinal information was relevant and when it was irrelevant to the task, showing that the spatial component of the ordinal representation can be automatically activated.     

The mental representation of the magnitude of symbolic and nonsymbolic ratios in adults

This study mainly investigated the specificity of the processing of fraction magnitudes. Adults performed a magnitude-estimation task on fractions, the ratios of collections of dots, and the ratios of surface areas. Their performance on fractions was directly compared with that on nonsymbolic ratios. At odds with the hypothesis that the symbolic notation impedes the processing of the ratio magnitudes, the estimates were less variable and more accurate for fractions than for nonsymbolic ratios. This indicates that the symbolic notation activated a more precise mental representation than did the nonsymbolic ratios. This study also showed, for both fractions and the ratios of dot collections, that the larger the components the less precise the mental representation of the magnitude of the ratio. This effect suggests that the mental representation of the magnitude of the ratio was activated from the mental representation of the magnitude of the components and the processing of their numerical relation (indirect access). Finally, because most previous studies of fractions have used a numerical comparison task, we tested whether the mental representation of magnitude activated in the fraction-estimation task could also underlie performance in the fraction-comparison task. The subjective distance between the fractions to be compared was computed from the mean and the variability of the estimates. This distance was the best predictor of the time taken to compare the fractions, suggesting that the same approximate mental representation of the magnitude was activated in both tasks.