Cognitive scientists and philosophers regularly appeal to representational formats to explain patterns of failure and success in psychological tasks. Often, this involves them analogizing mental representations to familiar forms of artefactual representations, such as sentences, pictures, graphs, maps, etc. In this paper, I suggest that this general strategy sometimes leads researchers to mistakenly attribute irrelevant properties of artefactual representations to our mental representations. I i…
Read moreCognitive scientists and philosophers regularly appeal to representational formats to explain patterns of failure and success in psychological tasks. Often, this involves them analogizing mental representations to familiar forms of artefactual representations, such as sentences, pictures, graphs, maps, etc. In this paper, I suggest that this general strategy sometimes leads researchers to mistakenly attribute irrelevant properties of artefactual representations to our mental representations. I illustrate this point using the format of visuospatial representations as a case study. Recent evidence suggests that humans encode visuospatial relations in a polar coordinate format, comprising an independent pairing of angle and distance from an anchor point. I argue, however, that these mental coordinates differ markedly from familiar mathematical coordinates by comprising analog rather than digital constituents. The result is a distinctive hybrid representational format that problematizes familiar ways of categorizing mental representations and illustrates how mental representations often contain overlooked combinations of properties.
