Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The relational match-to-sample (RMS) task assesses whether people are sensitive to matching relational content and con-sider such matches more compelling than an object-based alternative. On each trial, participants see a triad of shapesequences: target item (XYX), object match (VZY), and relational match (TST). In prior research, participants show arelational preference supporting the structural alignment account of similarity-based processing. We address two goals:1) assessing generality across variation in stimulus materials and task wording; and 2) investigating the hypothesis thatrelational responding can be promoted via presentation conditions for the RMS task. Specifically, along with the standardsimultaneous presentation of target plus options, we tested two sequential variations: presenting each possible match inisolation before showing the full triad and presenting only the target item for evaluation before showing the full triad.Results are discussed in the context of structural alignment theory and the role of relational encoding.