Mental representation

A mental state or structure that stands for an object, event, property, or state of affairs. Representations can be conscious or unconscious and may guide thought, perception, and action.

Intentionality: The capacity of mental states to be about objects, properties, or states of affairs. Representation is a central way mental states exhibit aboutness.
Computational theory of mind: The view that cognition involves computations over representations. It models thinking as operations on structured mental content.
Enactivism: An approach that explains cognition through an organism’s embodied interaction with its environment. It questions whether cognition requires inner representations of the world.
Working memory: A limited-capacity system for temporarily maintaining and manipulating information. Its contents are often treated as representations available for ongoing thought.
Mental content: The information or meaning carried by a mental state or representation. It specifies what a representation stands for.
Connectionism: An approach to cognition that models processing through networks of simple, interconnected units. It explains mental performance through distributed activation rather than explicit symbolic rules.
Direct realism: The view that perception gives direct access to external objects, rather than presenting inner mental objects. It rejects the idea that perception operates by inspecting internal stand-ins.
Semantic memory: Long-term memory for general knowledge, meanings, and facts, independent of their learning episodes. It stores knowledge represented without needing a specific remembered event.
Mental imagery: A sensory-like mental experience occurring without the corresponding external stimulus. Imagery is a familiar representational form that can resemble perception.
Predictive processing: A theory of brain function in which perception and action use predictions to reduce prediction errors. It treats perception as the construction and revision of predictions about sensory input.

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