Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Relational recognition is the process by which relational representations get recognized (i.e., representations that specify an actor and a patient, and are role sensitive). This process is currently poorly understood, but is an important aspect of relational cognition (Livins & Doumas, 2014). This paper presents two experiments that investigate the degree to which visuospatial factors influence it. The first is an exploratory eye-tracking study that shows that first fixations are correlated with what object gets bound to the actor role, while the second uses priming to show that such fixations can alter which relation is recognized.