Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many everyday activities pose only weak constraints on the order, in which certain actions have to be performed. Whensetting the table, for example, any order of putting the required items on the table will be fine as long as all necessary itemsare on the table eventually. Despite the commonality of weakly constrained sequences in everyday activities, little is knownabout how humans deal with such sequences. In this contribution, we argue that humans do not order weakly constrainedactions arbitrarily, but exhibit systematic patterns of orderings, which we term ordering preferences. Moreover, we arguethat the task environment’s spatial layout and its mental representation are key factors in determining such preferences.An initial empirical study on table setting corroborates this reasoning by revealing ordering preferences that seem to bebased on a regionalization of space and the distances between the regions.