We receive information about the world through our senses. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin encode objects of reality in visual, sound, taste, olfactory or tactile images. Feeling and perception help us acquire the necessary knowledge about the world and life experience. We can get everything we saw earlier from memory, thanks to the presentation process.
The concept of representation in psychology
This term means a mental process and is described as a reconstruction in the consciousness of objects or phenomena that we cannot observe at the moment, but due to the fact that we saw this earlier, some information remained in our memory.
The process of representation in psychology plays a very important role for a person in the process of cognition. Writing, creating artistic or musical images, and thinking are directly related to this process.
Performance Characteristics
From the point of view of psychology, the formation of ideas is due to the process of perception. We take pictures or record an image or phenomenon on our internal voice recorder, thanks to memory, we fix it in our consciousness. Thinking processes this data and assigns the desired format.
Visibility
The first characteristic feature of representation in psychology is visualization. If perception gives us a brightly felt picture, sound, taste, smell or tactile sensation, then the representation reproduces these data in a more faded version.
Fragmentation
The next characteristic is fragmentation. Since we have to recreate from memory, many elements are simply lost, there are bright moments, episodes. Colors, shapes, and spatial arrangement may be distorted. Faces we also perceive not holistically, but remember only certain features.
Inconstancy
Volatility can be considered one of the most significant characteristics. Any image runs the risk of erasing from consciousness, even if we do our best to keep it. To restore it, a person requires volitional efforts.
Fluidity and variability
Fluidity and variability are characterized by the fact that it is difficult for us to focus on any one element of the image of representation. Our inner attention will slip away. However, a talented artist can focus his attention on visual elements, a musician on sound, a perfumer on olfactory, etc.
Generalization
Since we use the presentation every day, for faster work the brain compresses the information available in it. In fact, this leads to a generalization of images. This applies even to very specific items. For example, we hold the phone in our hands almost 24 hours a day, but hearing this word, in our minds we draw a generalized image of this gadget.
Types of perceptions by types of sensations
A significant part of human representations is based on visual images. We can remember an object in all the little things and nuances, if in the past we had the opportunity to concentrate our attention on it for a long time, more often our brain remembers some particular fragment or characteristic: color, shape, detail, etc. Often in our ideas we we see a flat picture, less often a volumetric one. The image can be both color and black and white, sometimes even colorless.
Auditory representations in psychology are the mental reproduction of sounds. They are conditionally divided into speech and music. The first ones turn on when you need to say a word in your mind, remember the timbre, intonation. Musical representations can be the result of experience gained in the form of songs, arias, etc., or generated independently by the brain if a person has the talent of a composer.
Motor sensations are vastly different from everyone else because the images do not float quietly in the brain, but are transferred to the body and provoke a slight muscle contraction, which can be fixed with special equipment. They are not a reproduction of past sensations, but are connected with the actual ones that we are experiencing at the moment.
Spatial representations in psychology are a combination of visual and motor. It is activated when, for example, we recall the road from home to school or university.
Individual presentation features
Each person has a different type of presentation, according to this criterion all people can be divided into 4 groups:
- visuals (the most developed visual representations);
- audiences (the most developed auditory representations);
- kinesthetics (motor representations prevail);
- mixed type.
Persons with a high level of development of visual representations easily reproduce the information that they saw, that is, they have photographic memory. To master the information, they need to rely on diagrams, tables or graphs. If they recall the text from the book, they remember what the page looked like and where the necessary sentence was placed.
Audiences remember and reproduce information in the form of sounds, voices. Even recalling the text they have read, they hear the timbre of their inner voice.
Kinesthetics memorize information by sketching, recording. For them, action is important. These people think well spatially with focus on their bodies.
Pure visuals, audials and kinesthetics are quite rare, more often all three types of representations are combined in people.
If you do not know which group you belong to, this information about yourself can be obtained not only on the basis of self-observation, but also thanks to the methods of psychology. Representations of objects and their reproduction in their memory is one of the most effective ways.