On the Duality and on the Integration of Propositional and Spatial Representations

A substantial amount of work in cognitive psychology concerns the question how many kinds of mental representations there are and how many representations are required, with answers ranging from zero (e.g. Brooks, 1991) to unlimited (e.g. Sloman, 1985). In the imagery debate, a controversy arose over the question whether mental representations have a propositional format (Pylyshyn, 1973), a pictorial format (Kosslyn and Pomerantz, 1977; Kosslyn, 1980), or whether they make use of both formats (Paivio, 1986; Habel et al., 1995). Johnson-Laird's (1983) mental models provoke the question of their relationship to mental images.