The DOI matches its Crossref record; 11 of the 11 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Are theories of imagery theories of imagination? An active perception approach to conscious mental content
Open accessAbstract
Can theories of mental imagery, conscious mental contents, developed within cognitive science throw light on the obscure (but culturally very significant) concept of imagination? Three extant views of mental imagery are considered: quasi-pictorial, description, and perceptual activity theories. The first two face serious theoretical and empirical difficulties. The third is (for historically contingent reasons) little known, theoretically underdeveloped, and empirically untried, but has real explanatory potential. It rejects the “traditional” symbolic computational view of mental contents, but is compatible with recent situated cognition and active vision approaches in robotics. This theory is developed and elucidated. Three related key aspects of imagination (non-discursiveness, creativity, and seeing as) raise difficulties for the other theories. Perceptual activity theory presents imagery as non-discursive and relates it closely to seeing as. It is thus well placed to be the basis for a general theory of imagination and its role in creative thought.
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Cites
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Cited by
A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness
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Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience
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Mental imagery: In search of a theory
Pylyshyn, Z. W. (2002) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x02000043 · Cited by 722
The Unreliability of Naive Introspection
Schwitzgebel, E. (2008) · The Philosophical Review · doi:10.1215/00318108-2007-037 · Cited by 658
When is early visual cortex activated during visual mental imagery?
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Metadata
- Authors
- Thomas, N.
- Venue
- Cognitive Science
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1999-04-06
- Volume
- 23
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 207-245
- ISSN
- 0364-0213 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1980449029
- Cited by
- 298
- References
- 11
- FWCI
- 8.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
