From the Dictionary of Philosophy:
Things changed somewhat in the 1960s early 1970s, when (through the efforts of cognitive psychologists such as Allan Paivio, Roger Shepard, and Stephen Kosslyn) imagery once again became respectable as a topic for experimental psychological investigation. At about the same time, considerations of the need for an explanatory framework capable of handling cognitive process in higher animals and human infants (first language learning, in particular) led theorists away from theories that implied that "natural" (actually spoken) language is representationally basic. However, imagery is still far from regaining acceptance as the fundamental form of mental representation, and current theories of image formation hardly aspire to the central place in cognitive theory once occupied by the imagination. In contemporary Cognitive Science, imagery is usually treated as merely a representationally dependent auxiliary to other, more fundamental and "abstract" forms of mental representation, whether these be the pseudo-languages of "classical" Artificial Intelligence theories (philosophically represented by Jerry Fodor's "mentalese"), the weight spaces and activation patterns of connectionism, attractors in chaotic neural dynamic systems, or whatever.
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