Compare and contrast Kosslyn's and Pylyshyn's views of mental imagery. Provide examples to support your answer.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Student examples will vary. A sample answer follows. Kosslyn and Pylyshyn both tried to answer the question of how we hold and manipulate images in our minds. Kosslyn strongly believes that we represent mental images spatially, just as we look at a landscape or neighborhood spatially. He has designed several "mental travel" experiments, in which people took longer to answer a question if the starting point and the ending point in their visualization were further apart physically. For instance, he asked people to form a mental picture of an airplane. When he asked questions about the propeller and the tailfin (at opposite ends of the plane), it took them longer to answer the question than if he asked about two parts of the plane that were closer together.
Pylyshyn suggested a different answer to the question of how we manipulate mental images. He believed that they are propositional representations, not spatial images. To Pylyshyn, if we imagine a sentence like "Newton throws the ball," then each part of that sentence fits together to help us understand the sentence's meaning. In other words, the mind represents ideas as language rather than as navigable pictures. Pylyshyn explained the "mental travel" phenomenon as being related to time, not distance. To him, spatial mental images were just a by-product of forming language-based images. Most memory researchers side with Kosslyn, but Pylyshyn's view also has merit because it is not yet possible to monitor mental imagery directly.