Flexibility in Representational Systems

Abstract There has been a persisting controversy in the literature on visual information processing and mental imagery as to whether the internal representation of spatial information is most appropriately characterized as analog or as discrete and propositional in nature. It is argued that this controversy has been misdirected, and while succeeding in producing a rich body of experimental results, has failed to produce definitive theoretical conclusions. The view advanced in this paper is that the diversity and flexibility of systems for representing visual information should be explored vigorously, rather than attempting to isolate invariant properties of such systems. Evidence is reviewed suggesting that the nature of the representation of spatial information is highly sensitive to (a) changes in information-processing demands, (b) ability-related individual differences, and (c) levels of expertise in problem-solving skills.