Mental representation
HYPOTHETICAL INTERNAL COGNITIVE SYMBOL THAT REPRESENTS EXTERNAL REALITY
Representation (psychology); Representational theory of mind; Having an idea; Conceive an idea; Conceiving an idea; Good idea; Representation level; Level of representation; Directedness; Presentation (philosophy); Idea in anthropology
A mental representation (or cognitive representation), in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality, or else a mental process that makes use of such a symbol: "a formal system for making explicit certain entities or types of information, together with a specification of how the system does this".