Pylyshyn, Zenon W. The imagery debate: Analogue media versus tacit knowledge. Psychological Review 88(1) 1981. pp. 16-45. 5  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....the potential to be accessed and acted upon by cognitive processes in parallel, with higher priority than unFINSTed items. We use this model to predict the interaction of dynamic display events and cognitive processes, and to design displays that are optimized for the particular mental processes [13, 14]. A concentration on the nature of the linkages between perceptual events and cognitive structures substantially alters the way we think about mental representations. Given this mechanism, we can derive models of information processing that rely upon the perceptual world to provide much of its own ....

Pylyshyn, Zenon W. The imagery debate: Analogue media versus tacit knowledge. Psychological Review 88(1) 1981. pp. 16-45. 5

....remember objects in space (e.g. the arrangement of furniture in our living room, or the path we take to work each day) is qualitatively different from the way we think about and remember facts or experiences we have had. This difference is born out by a great deal of research in spatial cognition [17]. 4 The nature of that difference, however, may not be intuitively obvious. While we typically feel that our memory of events in space is itself spatial (e.g. we visualize our living room in a way that is very similar to actually seeing it) this intuition is inconsistent with the modularity ....

Pylyshyn, Zenon W. The imagery debate: Analogue media versus tacit knowledge. Psychological Review 88(1) 1981. pp. 16-45.

....remember objects in space (e.g. the arrangement of furniture in our living room, or the path we take to work each day) is qualitatively different from the way we think about and remember facts or experiences we have had. This difference is born out by a great deal of research in spatial cognition [17]. The nature of that difference, however, may not be intuitively obvious. While we typically feel that our memory of events in space is itself spatial (e.g. we visualize our living room in a way that is very similar to actually seeing it) this intuition is inconsistent with the modularity ....

Pylyshyn, Zenon W. The imagery debate: Analogue media versus tacit knowledge. Psychological Review 88(1) 1981. pp. 16-45.

....conception and imagery. The predictions just made are for amodal theories that distinguish mental images in working memory from amodal knowledge in long term memory (e.g. Kosslyn, 1980) Other amodal theories, assume that amodal symbols represent both mental images and long term knowledge (e.g. Pylyshyn, 1981). However, these latter theories also predict instructional inequivalence. According to these theories, subjects under imagery instructions use tacit amodal knowledge to mimic perceptual performance. Under neutral instructions, however, subjects should have no reason to attempt mimicry and should ....

Pylyshyn, Z.W. (1981). The imagery debate: Analogue media versus tacit knowledge. Psychological Review, 88, 16-45.

....path from the first object to the second. Kosslyn consistently found that the time required to complete the mental scanning was directly proportional to the physical distance between the objects in the imaged scene. Thus the scanning is very much like scanning the actual configuration of objects. Pylyshyn (1981) has criticized many of the conclusions relating properties of mental images to those of pictures. In the debate on the nature of mental images, he identifies as the main issue which properties of mental images are inherent in the functional architecture of cognition. Pylyshyn considers the ....

Pylyshyn, Z.W. (1981). "The Imagery Debate: Analogue Media versus Tacit Knowledge." Psychological Review 88: 16--45, 1981.

.... and their inverse relationships [1] Extensions of Allen s interval algebra to one and two dimensional spaces can be found in [11] and [14] Furthermore, it has been argued that propositional like representations, instead of picture like images, could be responsible for human spatial reasoning [30]. Figure 4 illustrates how the spatial knowledge of Figure 2 can be captured using a logic based representation. Figure 4 Egenhofer has presented a formalism which deals with binary topological relationships, that is, relationships which are invariant under topological transformations [8] In ....

Pylyshyn, Z.W. (1981) The Imagery Debate: Analogue Media Versus Tacit Knowledge. Psychological Review, 88, 16-45.

....in cognitive psychology during the last decades. But the general question has been decomposed into many virtually smaller ones. Most popular has been the imagery debate in which it is discussed whether representations of visual information is coded in a propositional or dipictional format ( Pylyshyn 81, Kosslyn et al. 90] Experiments in this area are mostly situated in semantic free small scale environments and do not consider realistic scenarios. Real world situations are investigated by experiments about how large scale affects human anticipation of the environment (cf. Downs Stea 73, ....

Z. W. Pylyshyn. The Imagery Debate: Analogue Media versus Tacit Knowledge. Psychological Review, 87:16--45, 1981.

....visually by generation and examination of images on an internal retina , using for reasoning essentially the 20 Diagrammatic representation and reasoning Machine GRAPHICS VISION vol. 3, nos. 1 2, 1994, pp. 77 103. same brain apparatus as for perception. The opposing school, lead by Pylyshyn [16] claims the pictorial images we sometimes see in introspection during reasoning are purely epiphenomenal and the real reasoning is essentially propositional. Recently, interesting models attempting a reconciliation of the two positions were proposed [43] Be it as it may, we certainly are able ....

Pylyshyn Z.W.: The imagery debate: analogue media versus tacit knowledge. Psychological Review, 88, 16-45.

....case in vision appears to be different, since it would seem that the equivalent of having direct causal contact with a feature in a 3 D scene is not possible. That s because the only visual sensors we have are ones that respond to the 2 D retinal projection of the scene (cf Pylyshyn, 1984; Fodor Pylyshyn, 1981), and the mapping from the 3 D object features to the 2 D retinal features is not in general reversible. Nonetheless and this is a central assumption of the FINST model we can do something very analogous to pointing. The present approach posits a mechanism called a FINST, which ....

.... glances fails to present entire critical features in individual glances (Hochberg, 1968) Such results suggest that the off retinal information is not visual in the same way that retinal information is, but rather is abstract and conceptual much like the information in a mental image (Pylyshyn, 1981). In general it is easy to overestimate the amount of visually reinterpretable information available at off retinal locations. Indeed, if one could index off retinal locations in some way (as will be hypothesized below) then a simple label attached to such an index (e.g. concave edge, convex ....

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Pylyshyn, Z.W. (1981). The Imagery Debate: Analogue Media versus Tacit Knowledge, Psychological Review 88:16-45.

....physical requirements of a Classical symbol processing system are easily misunderstood. Confounding of physical and functional properties is widespread in psychological theorizing in general; for a discussion of this confusion in relation to metrical properties in models of mental imagery, see Pylyshyn 1981). For example, conventional architecture requires that there be distinct symbolic expressions for each state of affairs that it can represent. Since such expressions often have a structure consisting of concatenated parts, the adjacency relation must be instantiated by some physical relation when ....

Pylyshyn, Z.W. (1981). The imagery debate: Analogue media versus tacit knowledge. Psychological Review, 88, 16-45.

....are willing to take direct attention to as a primitive operation that is not amenable to an information processing explanation (so that, for example, they can rest on such statements as that hunger . directs attention to information about edibility ) As Fodor and I pointed out (Fodor Pylyshyn, 1981), without principled constraints on what can be attended or picked up, this form of explanation becomes vacuous. On the other hand I do agree with Withagen and Michaels that environments must be described relative to the organism and that meaning arises from the interaction of an organism and ....

.... and imagery consist in constructing pictures in the head which are viewed in what Dennett (1991) calls the Cartesian theater because that s what it feels like (see the excellent critique of this view in O Regan, 1992, and for that matter see my critique of the mental imagery research in Pylyshyn, 1973, 1981). No Thompson themselves draw conclusions based on certain beliefs about conscious content and it leads them to say odd things, for example that if the output of early vision were conscious, it would be cognitively penetrable and therefor that I am committed to the view that all outputs of ....

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Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1981). The imagery debate: Analogue media versus tacit knowledge.

.... this renaissance in interest in mental imagery, the emphasis turned from the study of learning and the appeal to imagery as a intervening variable to an attempt to work out the nature of mental images themselves (this work is summarized in Kosslyn, 1980) for a critique of this later work, see Pylyshyn, 1981). Led by the influential work of Stephen Kosslyn, researchers investigated the structure of mental images, including their metrical properties. For example, images seemed to actually have distance, since it took longer to scan greater distance in an image; they seemed to have size inasmuch as it ....

....from what they know about the situation being imagined, and are simulating what they believe would have happened if a real event were being observed, or because (2) special image specific mechanisms are deployed when one reasons using mental images. This is the disagreement that I wrote about in (Pylyshyn, 1981) and, I believe, remains one of the main questions about mental imagery. One of the things that makes this debate both ironic and ill posed is that it is hard to disagree with most of the picture theory 1 views in this discussion, since there is something right about the claims. It is true that ....

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Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1981). The imagery debate: Analogue media versus tacit knowledge.

....ratio. But the notion of filtering , as applied to visual attention, is a very misleading metaphor. We cannot filter just any properties we like, for the same reason that we cannot in general directly pick up any properties we like such as affordances (see the discussion in Fodor Pylyshyn, 1981). All we can do in filtering is attempt to capitalize on some physically specifiable detectable property that is roughly coextensive with the class of stimuli to which the system is to be sensitized, and to use that property to distinguish those from other stimuli. If the perceptual system ....

....J.J. Gibson, who argued that inference was not needed since vision consists in the direct pickup of relevant information from the optic array by a process more akin to resonance than to inference. We will not discuss this approach here since considerable attention was devoted to it in Fodor Pylyshyn, 1981). Beginning with the work of David Marr (1982) however, a great deal of theoretical analysis has shown that there is another option for how the visual system can uniquely invert the 3D to 2D mapping. All that is needed is that the computations carried out in early processing embody (without ....

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Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1981). The imagery debate: Analogue media versus tacit knowledge. Psychological Review, 88, 16-45.

....variety of visual tasks. 2 Background: The search for cognitive architecture On the last occassion such as this the 10th anniversary issue of Cognition I described the guiding assumption of my research as the belief that there are two kinds of explanatory principles in psychology (Pylyshyn, 1981b) One set of principles advert to the beliefs and goals that the person has and the other is concerned with the kind of computational device that a human organism instantiates the kinds of basic cognitive operations of which it is capable, the constraints under which it must operate and ....

....cognitive model can take. As an example of (1) I have argued that results such as those observed in experiments on mental scanning , as well as several other mental image manipulation experiments, tell us nothing about the nature of mind, or of the form of representation underlying mental images (Pylyshyn, 1981a) Rather, they tell us what subjects believe about the nature of the task and what they know about the world. I argued that these beliefs, together with the rationality of most mental processes, and the possession of certain minimal psychophysical capacities, explains the relevant regularities ....

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Pylyshyn, Z. (1981). The imagery debate: Analogue media versus tacit knowledge.

....remain true even if the architecture were different from that hypothesized. For example, this appears to be the case with certain kinds of imagery phenomena, such as the linear relation between reaction time and the distance on a mental image that is mentally scanned (for more on this case, see Pylyshyn, 1981). That s because the linear increase can be made to disappear by changing the instructions; for example, by asking subjects to imagine a situation in which they do not believe there would be any increase in reaction time as a function of distance (that is, in which they believe there would be no ....

....instead, tell us either about the way in which the process is physically (i.e. neurophysiologically) instantiated on some particular occasion or in one particular individual, or they might tell us about subjects tacit knowledge, or about the nature of the task itself. For example, I have argued (Pylyshyn, 1981, 1984) that many of the phenomena of mental imagery research (e.g. the so called mental scanning results of Kosslyn, 1980) are of just this sort. In these cases it appears that the particular reaction time patterns observed are not the direct result of properties of the architecture, but of ....

Pylyshyn, Z.W. 1981. "The Imagery Debate: Analogue Media versus Tacit Knowledge," Psychological Review 88:16-45.

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