It remains controversial whether the visual system encodes abstract relational roles such as Agent and Patient in visual events. The present experiment tested whether abstract role bindings induce priming effects across consecutive events. Each trial included a static target image preceded either by a brief silent video of a priming event or by an audio-visual presentation of an English sentence describing the same event. Example sentence: “The red goat on the left knocked down the blue goat on the right.” 64 videos counterbalanced 4 event types: launching, deforming, breaking, and a relationally ambiguous control. The set of static targets were the final frames of the same videos. The role bindings were either repeated, switched, or ambiguous across the target and prime. The dependent variable was the latency on a color-localization task (e.g., whether the red animal was on the left or on the right). Whereas the linguistic primes had no statistically significant effect on the latency of the visual task, the role bindings of the video primes did have an effect: The latency on unambiguous trials (which required role binding) was significantly greater than that on ambiguous trials (on which at least one component lacked clear relational roles). This suggests the visual system is sensitive to (the ambiguity of) the role bindings of abstract relations.

We investigated whether the representation of relational categories is different from that of featural categories. Earlier work has suggested an extreme-value hypothesis: when a category is defined in terms of a relation, exemplars with exaggerated values along this stimulus dimension are judged as better members of the category. Featural categories, on the other hand, are not exaggerated. To test this hypothesis, we trained participants to categorize two fictional diseases defined either by a deterministic relation or a deterministic feature. After the categorization task was mastered up to a predefined learning criterion, we provided a graphical user interface that enabled participants to construct good examples of the acquired categories by adjusting the stimulus attributes. We constructed a novel index of relational exaggeration based on residual deviations from a non-exaggerated response strategy. These results supported the extreme-value hypothesis. This replicates and extends an earlier quasi-experimental study (Du et al., 2021).

The mental representation of relation-based concepts is different from that of feature-based concepts. In the present experiment, participants learned to categorize two fictional diseases that were defined either by a feature (e.g., short cells) or an ordinal relation (e.g., diseased cells being shorter than healthy cells). After the participants learned the categorization task to criterion, their strategies were probed in transfer task in which features and relations were pitted against one another. Finally, participants engaged in a stimulus reconstruction task. The results supported the prediction that participants who had adopted a feature-based strategy on a stimulus dimension, as identified by transfer data, tended to reconstruct values close to the means presented during training. By contrast, participants who had adopted a relation-based strategy tended to exaggerate that dimension away from the mean of the training examples and in the direction of the category-defining comparative relation. These data add to the growing literature suggesting that, unlike featural categories, relational categories are not represented in terms of the category’s central tendency.