ABSTRACT
The fundamental premise on which the information-processing revolution in psychology was built is that the mind/brain can be protably understood as a computational device. Central to this notion of computation is that there are data structures in the mind that format the information used in psychological processing, and that these data structures are processed by procedures that make use of this information (Markman 1999; Palmer 1978). Many theories in psychology focus on representation in a functional sense (see the chapter in this volume by Polger). That is, they talk about the ways that people represent and process information independently of the physical implementation of those representations and processes within the brain. In contrast, this chapter is explicitly concerned with issues relevant to thinking about representation and the brain. To accomplish this goal, the chapter begins with a brief discussion of the concept of representation (see also the chapters in this volume by Ryder, and Adams and Aizawa). Then, we examine two ways of thinking about representational issues in the brain. The rst examines representation at the level of individual neurons and groups of neurons. The second focuses on broad implications of the regions of the brain that are active during cognitive processing for the content of mental representations. In both of these sections we focus primarily on philosophical issues that affect our ability to make claims about mental representation rather than on current beliefs about the way the brain is representing particular kinds of information. The reason for this focus is that neuroscience is a rapidly developing eld. Specic claims about the functionality of particular brain regions will undoubtedly become outdated quickly, but the philosophical issues underlying our understanding of representation in the brain remain more constant.
