4. Mental Representations

In the previous topic (3. Memory), we mentioned “knowledge representation”. What IS that?

What Are Mental Representations?

Mental representations are cognitive structures that stand for something out in the world (e.g., you likely have a visual mental representation of your best friend — you can imagine in your mind’s eye what they look like) or may be abstract in nature (e.g., you likely have mental representations of addition and subtraction — ideas that exist beyond any one instance of addition or subtraction).

The most fundamental characteristic of mental representations is that they allow us to think about all aspects of the world in their absence:

• You can remember what your friend looks like even if they are not around.
• You can recall a conversation you had with them in the past.
• You can imagine a bike ride you have planned with them next week.

Mental representations can be:

• specific to a perceptual modality — visual, auditory, olfactory, etc., — or
• multi-modal — involving multiple perceptual modalities, — or even
• less concrete and more abstract (i.e., less tied to sensation and perception altogether) — this is often associated with verbal processing.

When talking about activating semantic (or conceptual) knowledge, we often refer to it as activating a mental representation.

How Does Context Affect Mental Representations?

Notably, mental representations are not static but malleable and dynamic (e.g., Garcia-Marques et al., 2006). For example, the mental representation of your best friend when you remember your conversation with them yesterday is likely distinct from the one you have of them when you imagine your future bike ride together.

Of course, there will be a lot of overlap between the two mental representations, but each instance is unique — shaped by the context in which you activate it. This context includes the external context of where you are and what is currently happening — stimuli in the environment and your perception of them — and the internal context of your current thoughts, emotions, goals, and motivations.

This characteristic is true not only for mental representations of episodic memory (things recalled from the past or prospectively imagined for the future) but also for semantic memory.

For example, depending on the context (external and internal, as described above), your activated mental representation of a doctor / medical professional would be different if you are sitting in the waiting room at a walk-in clinic because of a bad headache versus if you are waiting with your kid at emergency because of a broken ankle.

Why do we care about all this?

How are modes of processing, episodic and semantic memory, and mental representations relevant to heuristics and social reasoning?