Mapping the Visual Icon

Abstract : It is often claimed that pre-attentive vision has an ‘iconic’ (roughly : picture-like) format. This has been seen to explain pre-attentive vision’s characteristically high processing capacity and to make sense of an overlap in the mechanisms of early vision and mental imagery. But what does the iconicity of pre-attentive vision actually amount to ? This paper considers two prominent ways of characterising pre-attentive visual icons and argues that neither is entirely adequate : one approach renders the claim ‘pre-attentive vision is iconic’ empirically false while the other obscures its ability to do the explanatory work which motivates positing pre-attentive visual icons in the first place. With this noted, I introduce the (heretofore unarticulated) notion of an ‘Analog Map’ and argue that it offers a superior characterisation of the way in which pre-attentive visual representations are iconic. I then argue that this forces a reassessment of debates which have traditionally presupposed the iconicity of pre-attentive vision, emphasising the ramifications my conclusions have for debates over the viability of a format-based perception-thought border.