Form, Formation, and Transformation of Internal Representations

Abstract

Among the kinds of unobservable internal events that have been explicitly discussed in psychology, it is the purely verbal mediators and, especially, the implicit naming responses that have been most extensively acknowledged, formalized and empirically studied. Since such covert responses could be assumed to have the same form and to obey the same laws as the corresponding overt responses from which they derived, the admission of this kind of internal event entailed the least drastic violation of previously self-imposed behavioristic strictures. Moreover, the problems of the form and the transformation of internal representations, with which we shall be principally concerned here, did not arise in nearly so crucial a way. First, since it is clear that generally the word that is learned for a particular object is associated with it by arbitrary convention, there has never been any temptation to puzzle about the formal or structural relation between a word (or its internal representation) and the external object, say, for which that word stands. Second, since a word is not only arbitrary in this sense but also is a fixed, categorical unit, it is not in general the case that the kinds of transformations to which objects are subject in the external world are in any way paralleled by analogous transformations in the corresponding words.

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