Representation
Posted on August 7, 2008 by Madalin Szemkovics
Filed Under Basics |
Representation is the first mental process that doesn’t require direct contact with the external stimulus to take place. As we will see in a future article, our memory doesn’t have a specific space in which the data is recorded, stored and afterwards read, like a computer’s hard drive. The memory is divided among different processes that take advantage of it. Representation is one of them, and stores the information from perception for a very short time. The object’s image does not go away right after the object stops contact with the physical analyzer; it remains there for up to one second.
The representation simply reflects certain properties (more or less significant) of objects that previously interacted with our senses. One of its most important aspects is that the scheme of a specific representation is always done in a selective manner; the picture includes just some of that object’s properties. A very good example for understanding what representation is would be a mirror that reflects a distorted image of what it ’sees’, like the one above. The cause of the selectiveness is the quality of perception, which selects from the environment incomplete sets of sensations.
Yes, each minute we are fooled again and again by our own mind, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Some techniques tried to fix this, and one of the most interesting is the development of a photographic memory. In fact, this process focuses on the quantity of the information, instead of the quality. It’s like turning a .bmp image focused at one point into a .jpg focused on more aspects. The .jpg will have more features of the objects in it, but they would all be poorly edited. Aside that, imagine that all the stored data has a certain term before self-deletion, and the .bmp files are scheduled for deletion later than .jpgs.
One of the most important functions of the representation is that it gives us mental schemes for semantic properties. For example, if I say ‘horse’, you will see what is your permanent mental scheme of a horse. It will automatically be white, dark or brown, and will be in a predefined position (standing, rising on its back feet, laying). As you see, there is a strong link between representation, notions and concepts.
After the representation is ready, the information is usually sent to the medium or long-term memory for storage. There, data can suffer changes, some of them caused by other representations. The sooner we see again an object, the easier it is for us to add other properties to the initial representation.
Representations plays a major role in our mental status; without them, our psychic would have little to none activity. Just think of how many processes function on the information provided by representations: our memory would have nothing to store; because of the representation’s importance to knowledge, our thinking would be out of job, as it wouldn’t have informations to process; we wouldn’t have linguistic capabilities, no imagination, no motivation or attention and generally no activity, which would be determined by the non-existence of motivation. So, fooling us or not, our representation deserves our gratitude.
Comments
One Response to “Representation”
Leave a Reply
-
Recently Written
-
Categories
-
Archives
-
Blogroll
[...] remembers all the details of the memorized object) or partial (when elements from the initial representation are missing). Completeness is the same as fidelity, only that it refers to the amount of retained [...]