Oxford Psychology
1 total work
How do we represent information mentally, and how do we use that information to interact with the world? The problem is old and persistent - and complex. The new discipline of cognitive science takes the problem of mental representations as its main domain. Controversy centres on a philosophical issue: empiricism versus rationalism. This book offers a clear analysis of the philosophical roots of this controversy, and a balanced assessment of the merits of different theoretical approaches to cognitive representation. After reviewing the prevailing attitudes among contemporary psychologists, the author provides a systematic account of his dual coding theory of mental representations, which proposes that non-verbal and linguistic phenomena are handled cognitively by two separate subsystems - the imagery and verbal systems. Developmental mechanisms of the dual coding system are discussed, as are individual differences. The system is then related to specific cognitive phenomena, including semantic memory, episodic memory, the manipulation and use of representative information, language comprehension and production, and bilingual cognitive representation