Redundancy and reducibility in the formats of spatial representations

Abstract

Mental representations are the essence of cognition. Yet, to understand how the mind works, we must understand not just the content of mental representations (i.e., what information is stored), but also the format of those representations (i.e., how that information is stored). But what does it mean for representations to be formatted? How many formats are there? Is it possible that the mind represents some pieces of information in multiple formats at once? To address these questions, I discuss a ‘case study’ of representational format: the representation of spatial location. I review work (a) across species and across development, (b) across spatial scales, and (c) across levels of analysis (e.g., high-level cognitive format vs. low-level neural format). Along the way, I discuss the possibility that the same information may be organized in multiple formats simultaneously (e.g., that locations may be represented in both Cartesian and polar coordinates). Ultimately, I argue that seemingly ‘redundant’ formats may support the flexible spatial behavior observed in humans, and that we should approach the study of all mental representations with this possibility in mind.

Oblique biases: An instance of domain- and modality-general spatial representation

“…Because of this, it may follow that the mind is likely to be representing spatial information in some sort of polar coordinate system. Indeed, analyses of errors like those studied here have revealed that polar error are independent from distance errors (while errors in cartesian dimensions are not independent from one another), lending further support for this conclusion (see Yousif & Keil, 2021;Yousif, 2022).…”

“…For instance, it is possible that points are biased towards the 'prototype' of a category, and that, in addition to this categorical effect, there is an additional effect of angular acuity, as we have proposed here. (A detailed analysis of these errors may provide further evidence against the categorical model, but we nevertheless wouldn't rule it out entirely; see Yousif et al, 2020;Yousif & Keil, 2021;Yousif, 2022.) Further, it is likely that there are truly more orientationselective neurons that are tuned to cardinal vs. oblique orientations (Li et al, 2003) and that this difference results in acuity differences. But then a mystery remains: Why would all these related effects -many of which are stable within individual -arise from distinct mechanisms?…”