Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Given identical informational content, the order in which youreceive spatial information may heavily influence the correct-ness of your mental representation. This can reveal importantinsights into the specifics of human spatial cognition and theway we integrate information. Despite its importance in ev-eryday life, its causes and the mental processes involved stillremain an open question. Most cognitive models so far havefocused on modeling only answer distributions or just the mostfrequent answer given by all participants.In this paper we take a rather radical approach: We turn tothe individual spatial reasoner and focus our analyses on thestream of spatial information and related reaction times, i.e.,how the spatial information is represented and cognitively pro-cessed. By spanning a space of 243 cognitive spatial models,some of which outperform the current state-of-the art models,it is possible to test the goodness of general principles under-lying such models.