Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

After many years of neglect, the topic of mental imagery has recently emerged as an active area of debate. One aspect of this ongoing debate is whether an image is represented as a description or a depiction of its components. This paper is not so concerned with how mental images are stored, as with what machine representations will provide a basis for imagery as a problem solving paradigm in artificial intelligence. In fact, we argue that a knowledge representation scheme that combines the ability to reason about both descriptions and depictions of images best facilitates the efficient implementation of the processes involved in imagery.