Grounding Mental Representations in a Virtual Multi-Level Functional Framework

According to the associative theory of learning, reactive behaviors described by stimulus-response pairs result in the progressive wiring of a plastic brain. In contrast, flexible behaviors are supposedly driven by neurologically grounded mental states that involve computations on informational contents. These theories appear complementary, but are generally opposed to each other. The former is favored by neuro-scientists who explore the low-level biological processes supporting cognition, and the later by cognitive psychologists who look for higher-level structures. This situation can be clarified through an analysis that independently defines abstract neurological and informational functionalities, and then relate them through a virtual interface. This framework is validated through a modeling of the first stage of Piaget’s cognitive development theory, whose reported end experiments demonstrate the emergence of mental representations of object displacements. The neural correlates grounding this emergence are given in the isomorphic format of an associative memory. As a child’s exploration of the world progresses, his mental models will eventually include representations of space, time and causality. Only then epistemological concepts, such as beliefs, will give rise to higher level mental representations in a possibly richer propositional format. This raises the question of which additional neurological functionalities, if any, would be required in order to include these extensions into a comprehensive grounded model. We relay previously expressed views, which in summary hypothesize that the ability to learn has evolved from associative reflexes and memories, to suggest that the functionality of associative memories could well provide the sufficient means for grounding cognitive capacities.