representationsmental

Representationsmental refers to the concept of mental representations in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Mental representations are internal states that encode information about objects, properties, and states of affairs in the external world, supporting perception, reasoning, memory, and action. They can take multiple forms, including propositional representations that encode declarative content (for example, "the ball is red"), mental imagery that resembles sensory experiences, and procedural representations that guide skilled action, often without conscious reporting. In addition, many theories posit subsymbolic, distributed representations underlying learning and perception.

Theoretical perspectives diverge on the nature and organization of representations. Symbolic or classical theories argue that cognition operates on discrete symbols and rules. Connectionist or subsymbolic approaches propose distributed patterns of activation, learned from data, that support similar tasks. Embodied or grounded cognition emphasizes that representations are rooted in sensorimotor systems, and may be partly independent of amodal symbols. Predictive coding models view representations as generative models used to predict sensory input, updated by error signals. The symbol grounding problem highlights the challenge of connecting abstract representations with real-world meaning.

Neuroscientific research seeks neural representations: patterns of activity across populations that correspond to particular objects, features, or concepts, as revealed by neuroimaging and decoding studies. The study of representationsmental informs understanding of perception, language, memory, decision making, and artificial intelligence, where similar representational ideas guide algorithm design.