Cognitive Science - the Question of Knowledge Representation and the Propositional Mental Representations

In cognitive psychology, the term representation refers to the way information is mentally represented through coded symbols (Eysenk & Keane, 2000). It is a construction of the mind that results from the processing of external stimuli and is of primary importance in problem solving, communication and education. Piaget introduced the concept of representation in 1936 to explain the child's ability to control the invisible movements of an object. The child must have a mental representation of the object, which guarantees its permanence in space and time (Mounoud & Vinter, 1985). Starting, as psychology has historically done, from an empiricist model that sees the mental as arising from representations of the real through the senses, we can identify an important point for research into the types of representations, even if this is defined as a subject mainly for external representations. If we accept that the mental consists of representations, then it is natural to ask the question “what kinds of representations?” The Cognitive Revolution told us that we know what the mental is: they are internal representations, analogous to symbolic representations (Haugeland, 1985). But we need to better understand how different elements are involved in the mental process that leads to the creation of representations (Moser, et. al.,2015).