Imagery versus Propositional Reasoning

Abstract

Thought cannot consist solely of either words or mental images (perceptual representations that arise from information stored in memory); both representations are potentially ambiguous, and people never report having genuinely ambiguous thoughts (being unsure, for example, whether they are thinking of a wine or harbor when considering a ‘port’). Rather, thought apparently arises from more abstract ‘propositional’ representations, which are unambiguous language-like assertions. Nevertheless, mental imagery plays a role in thought as a kind of ‘mental notepad,’ analogous to the role of an actual notepad when one does arithmetic. Images can store information simultaneously, organize it spatially, and can serve as a vehicle for computing the consequences of specific actions. The remarkable flexibility of the human information processing system arises in part because we not only can make use of different types of representations, but can use them in different ways. Some reasoning may be most effectively accomplished using only propositional representations, and other reasoning may be most effective using a combination of types of representations.