Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Since the "equivalence" of imagery and perception has been one of the cenU^al tenets of the pictorial theory, the negative results of Chambers and Reisberg (1985) on an image reinterpretation task may be seen as posing a fundamental challenge for the pictorial account. Finke, Pinker and Farah's (1989) claimed refutation of these negative results may be questioned on a number of methodological grounds. In addition to examining these issues, we report results of an experiment which tests what is seemingly another direct prediction of pictorial theories. Our investigation employs newly devised imagery tasks whose success depends on being able to "rotate", "inspect" and reinterpret images. Our negative results add further weight to a tacit knowledge account of images as intrinsically interpreted, abstract symbols.