Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article Mental Imagery: In search of a theory by Zenon W. Pylyshyn http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Pylyshyn/Referees/ This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to nominate someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. A full electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the online BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below. _____________________________________________________________ Mental Imagery: In search of a theory Zenon W. Pylyshyn Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science New Brunswick, New Jersey ABSTRACT: It is generally accepted that there is something special about reasoning that uses mental images. The question of how it is special, however, has never been satisfactorily spelled out, despite over thirty years of research in the post-behaviorist tradition. This article considers some of the general motivation for the assumption that entertaining mental images involves inspecting a picture-like object. It sets out a distinction between phenomena attributable to the nature of mind, to what is called the cognitive architecture, and ones that are attributable to tacit knowledge used to simulate what would happen in a visual situation. With this distinction in mind the paper then considers in detail the widely held assumption that in some important sense images are spatially displayed or are depictive, and that examining images uses the same mechanisms that are deployed in visual perception. I argue that the assumption of the spatial or depictive nature of images is only explanatory if taken literally, as a claim about how images are physically instantiated in the brain, and that the literal view fails for a number of empirical reasons Ð e.g., because of the cognitive penetrability of the phenomena cited in its favor. Similarly, while it is arguably the case that imagery and vision involve some of the same mechanisms, this tells us very little about the nature of mental imagery and does not support claims about the pictorial nature of mental images. Finally I consider whether recent neuroscience evidence clarifies the debate over the nature of mental images. I claim that when such questions as whether images are depictive or spatial are formulated more clearly, the evidence does not provide support for the picture-theory over a symbol structure theory of mental imagery. Even if all the empirical claims turned out to be true, the view that many people take them to support, that mental images are literally spatial, remain incompatible with what is known about how images function in thought. We are then left with the provisional counterintuitive conclusion that the available evidence does not support rejection of what I call the "null hypothesis"; viz., that reasoning with mental images involves the same form of representation and the same processes as that of reasoning in general, except that the content or subject matter of thoughts experienced as images includes information about how things would look. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Pylyshyn/Referees/ ___________________________________________________________ Please do not prepare a commentary yet. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. We will then let you know whether it was possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees. _______________________________________________________________________ *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENTS *** (1) The authors of scientific articles are not paid money for their refereed research papers; they give them away. What they want is to reach all interested researchers worldwide, so as to maximize the potential research impact of their findings. Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View costs are accordingly access-barriers, and hence impact-barriers for this give-away research literature. There is now a way to free the entire refereed journal literature, for everyone, everywhere, immediately, by mounting interoperable university eprint archives, and self-archiving all refereed research papers in them. Please see: http://www.eprints.org http://www.openarchives.org/ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- (2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are strongly encouraged to self-archive all their papers in their own institution's Eprint Archives or in CogPrints, the Eprint Archive for the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ It is extremely simple to self-archive and will make all of our papers available to all of us everywhere, at no cost to anyone, forever. Authors of BBS papers wishing to archive their already published BBS Target Articles should submit it to BBSPrints Archive. Information about the archiving of BBS' entire backcatalogue will be sent to you in the near future. Meantime please see: http://www.bbsonline.org/help/ and http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- (3) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, useing your username and password above: http://www.bbsonline.org/ For information about the mailshot, please see the help file at: http://www.bbsonline.org/help/node5.html#mailshot *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*