Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The question of re-interpreting images can be seen as a new focus for the imagery debate since the possibility would appear to be a direct prediction of the pictorial account Finke, Pinker and Farah (1989) have claimed that their results "refute" the earlier negative evidence of Chambers and Reisberg (1985), while Peterson, Kihlstrom, Rose & Glisky (1992) have used the ambiguous stimuli of Chambers and Reisberg to show that under certain conditions, these images may be reinterpreted after all. By employing newly devised tasks, our o w n experiments have provided further conflicting evidence concerning the conditions under which images can and cannot be reinterpreted. W e consider their bearing on the fundamental 'format* issue which neither Finke et al (1989) nor Peterson et al. (1992) address directly.