Abstract
Much of computational cognitive science construes human cognitive capacities as representational
capacities, or as involving representation in some way. Computational theories of vision,
for example, typically posit structures that represent edges in the distal scene. Neurons are often
said to represent elements of their receptive fields. Despite the ubiquity of representational talk
in computational theorizing there is surprisingly little consensus about how such claims are to
be understood. The point of this chapter is to sketch an account of the nature and function of
representation in computational cognitive models.