Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

location to the first. In this condition, the linearly increasing relationship between
distance and time disappeared. Image scanning appears to be cognitively penetrable,
challenging some of the architectural claims of depictive theory. “Images can
be examined without the putative constraints of the surface display postulated by
Kosslyn and others” (Pylyshyn, 1981a, p. 40).
The cognitive penetrability paradigm has also been applied to the mental rotation
task (Pylyshyn, 1979b). Pylyshyn reasoned that if mental rotation is accomplished
by primitive mechanisms, then it must be cognitively impenetrable. One
prediction that follows from this reasoning is that the rate of mental rotation should
be independent of the content being rotated—an image depicting simple content
should, by virtue of its putative architectural nature, be rotated at the same rate as
a different image depicting more complex content.
Pylyshyn (1979b) tested this hypothesis in two experiments and found evidence
of cognitive penetration. The rate of mental rotation was affected by practice, by the
content of the image being rotated, and by the nature of the comparison task that
subjects were asked to perform. As was the case with image scanning, it would seem
that the “analog” rotation of images is not primitive, but is instead based on simpler
processes that do belong to the architecture.
The more carefully we examine phenomena, such as the mental rotation findings,
the more we find that the informally appealing holistic image-manipulation views
must be replaced by finer grained piecemeal procedures that operate upon an analyzed
and structured stimulus using largely serial, resource-limited mechanisms.
(Pylyshyn, 1979b, p. 27)
Cognitive penetrability has played an important role in domains other than mental
imagery. For instance, in the literature concerned with social perception and prediction,
there is debate between a classical theory called theory-theory (Gopnik &
Meltzoff, 1997; Gopnik & Wellman, 1992) and a newer approach called simulation
theory (Gordon, 1986, 2005b), which is nicely situated in the embodied cognitive
science that is the topic of Chapter 5. There is a growing discussion about
whether cognitive penetrability can be used to discriminate between these two theories
(Greenwood, 1999; Heal, 1996; Kuhberger et al., 2006; Perner et al., 1999; Stich
& Nichols, 1997). Cognitive penetrability has also been applied to various topics in
visual perception (Raftopoulos, 2001), including face perception (Bentin & Golland,
2002) and the perception of illusory motion (Dawson, 1991; Dawson & Wright, 1989;
Wright & Dawson, 1994).
While cognitive penetrability is an important tool when faced with the challenge
of examining the architectural equivalence between model and subject, it is
not without its problems. For instance, in spite of it being applied to the study of
mental imagery, the imager debate rages on, suggesting that penetrability evidence
112 Chapter 3