Representational Memory: Paivio's Levels of Meaning as Experiential Model and Conceptual Framework

Ten years ago, Paivio (1971) completed a review of human symbolic processing, a review that attempted to accommodate diverse findings from perception, memory, and language within a common conceptual framework. Central to that effort was a proposal about symbolic representation. The succeeding decade of cognitive psychology can be characterized as one of intensive concern with the nature of mental representation and the processes which operate on those representations. This conference provides a timely opportunity to reconsider Paivio’s general conceptualization and to examine not only its adequacy as a specific theory about mental representation but also the appropriateness of his perspective as a more general scheme within which to interpret current issues and findings in cognitive psychology.