Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper' proposes a new approach to mental imagery that has the potential for resolving an old debate. W e show that the methods by which fractals emerge from dynamical systems provide a natural computational framework for the relationship between the "deep" representations of long-term visual memory and the "surface" representations of the visual array, a distinction which was proposed by (Kosslyn, 1980). The concept of an iterated function system (IFS) as a highly compressed representation for a complex topological set of points in a metric space (Bamsley, 1988) is embedded in a connectionist model for mental imagery tasks. T w o advantages of this approach over previous models are the capability for topological transformations of the images, and the continuity of the deep representations with respect to the surface representations.