To me, everything in cognitive science is interesting. One of the things I learned in COG 166 and 266, also discussed in COG 444, is the mental representation debate. This stood out to me because this was the first time I had realized that I was different from my parents, peers, and friends in the way that my brain operates.
First of all, the mental representation debate is something that is still ongoing, because it is so hard to quantify and find empirical evidence that there is only one kind of mental imagery that is universal for all human beings. It was first brought up in COG 166 -- Introduction to Cognitive Science, and then again in 266 -- Brains, Minds, and Consciousness, and also in COG 444 -- Semiotics and the Study of Meaning. I find it so interesting that scientists are trying to single out one way of explaining the mental representations in our heads, because there's so much variation in being human that it doesn't make sense to me. For example, I have aphantasia (lack of mental imagery), so I cannot have analog mental representations (which means that I don't have an image-like exact replica that I can see with my mind's eye). I do, however, have propositional mental representations (which are more like sentence-like structures instead of images). Through many conversations with the people I know, there's so much variation of their mental representations even within that small sample! It's crazy how our brains use representations differently to provide us with the information we need to complete tasks.
Although my mental imagery is severely deficient, I can still complete tasks that support analog mental representations, such as mental rotation. However, if I were to do such a task, it would take me longer to solve these puzzles because I cannot visualize the object rotating-- personally, I would have to think about the object from a different perspective and match each part of the item to the non-rotated version, which is extremely time consuming.
Overall, although the mental representation debate is still ongoing, I don't really understand why we've been treating it as such a black-and-white issue (analog-and-propositional issue) because as I've learned during my time at SUNY Oswego, the human mind is so diverse and vast it doesn't make sense to box us in to having only one kind of representation of our thoughts. But, that's just my opinion, and hopefully as more people go through the cog sci program at SUNY Oswego we will be able to have a lively conversation about it in future semesters in COG 166 and 266.
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