Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Evidence that higher cognitive processes are coupled in agraded and time-continuous way to sensory-motor processescomes, in part, from mouse-tracking studies. In these, curvedmouse trajectories toward one of two fixed response locationsreveal the evolution of certainty about a cognitive task that par-ticipants solve. We present a paradigm in which selection ofthe response location is itself the cognitive task. From amongitems in a visual scene, participants select a target that is de-scribed by a spatial relation (e.g.,“the red to the left of thegreen”), where one target item (here, “red”) matches the de-scription better than alternative same-colored targets. In themouse trajectories, we find clear evidence for attraction tothe alternative targets, attraction to the reference item (here“green”), and an early biasing influence of the spatial term.