ABSTRACT
In this chapter the authors present three hypotheses about mental representation, which they formulated following observation of pathological behavior occurring in adults after focal brain damage. The authors suggest deep and surface representations to share a single basic code, which has analog properties. Stored information is multiplied and distributed over an extended neural net, so that a holographic model may capture some of its properties; its structure, however, departs from such a model in important respects. The holographic hypothesis is appealing since it carries the idea of an imaginal character of long-term representations; it must however be complemented in order to provide a long-term basis for the realization of the cognitive structures which have previously been considered at the level of working memory representation. The ego-centered spatial indexing system is called in whenever an idle-representation is activated in working memory. The representation is thus constrained into one out of a multitude of ego-centered perspectives.
