The Puzzle of Imagistic Cognition

We often solve practical problems by means of picturing in our imaginations the motions of and interactions between objects.  For instance, an experienced builder of bird houses might imagine the bird house to be built, imagine the pieces that will be needed and imagine how they should go together.  The role of imagistic cognition becomes especially salient when it fails us.  For instance, in wrapping a box with gift wrap, we might cut a piece of paper that we pictorially imagine to be big enough but then discover that we imagined incorrectly and that the sheet is not big enough. Surprisingly, the nature and extent of imagistic cognition has never been the subject of intensive research in either philosophy or psychology.  But in view of contemporary interest in many related questions, the time is ripe to take up the question. This related research includes the structure and content of perceptual representation, scene parsing, perceptual tracking, motor control, and children's understanding of object motion. This project’s methods will be analytic and integrative.  By taking account of the related research that has already been conducted in philosophy and psychology, we aim to develop a clear conceptual framework. We will draw on contemporary philosophical work on the nature of perceptual representation (conceptual vs. nonconceptual, cognitive penetration, amodal completion, multisensory perception), philosophical work on the possibility of knowledge through imagination, the psychology of vision and the visual control of action (scene parsing, motor control, perceptual tracking, skill), and psychological work on cognitive development and in comparative psychology. We aim to clearly explain the difference between imagistic representation and discursive representation involving sentence-like representations, to define the representation relation between mental images and their contents and in terms of these relations to define principles of imagistic cognition.  Inasmuch as imagistic cognition makes up a significant share of human problem-solving, a serious scientific study of it promises to open up new directions in many fields, including human reasoning, language acquisition and developmental and comparative psychology.