Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We propose a cognitively plausible method for representingand querying spatial relationships in a neural architecture. Thistechnique employs a fractional binding operator that capturescontinuous spatial information in spatial semantic pointers(SSPs). We propose a model that takes an image with severalobjects, parses the image into an SSP memory representation,and answers queries about the objects. We demonstrate thatour model allows us to not only store and extract objects andtheir spatial information, but also perform queries based on lo-cation and in relation to other objects. We show that we canquery images with 2, 3, and 4 objects with relative spatial lo-cations. We also show that the model qualitatively reproducesKosslyn’s famous map experiment.