Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Relational integration, the process of integrating stimuli into relations, is often thought as the primary demand of the relation-monitoring task (RMT). The current study investigated the attentional demand to inhibit irrelevant visual stimuli on relational processing in the RMT. The relevance and salience of these stimuli was manipulated while considering the complexity of relations to be integrated. 172 participants also completed Latin Square Task and Anti-saccade task as criterion individual differences in relational integration and inhibition abilities. The results revealed interference from non-target stimuli was partly accounted for by their perceptual similarity with target stimuli. The salience effect was observed but was not moderated by Anti-saccade task performance. Relational complexity was found to interact with all manipulations probing attentional function. The findings advanced our understanding of the interplay between the attentional and relational processes involved in the RMT.