Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two experiments are reported that investigated the influence of linear spatial organization on transitive inference performance. RewardAio-reward relations between overlapping pairs of elements were presented in a context of linear spatial order or random spatial order. Participants in the linear arrangement condition showed evidence for visual reasoning: They systematically mapped spatial relations to conceptual relation and used the spatial relations to make inferences on a reasoning task in a new spatial context. We suggest that linear ordering may be a "good figure", by constituting a parsinuxiious representation for the integration of premises, as well as for the inferencing process. The late emergence of transitive inference in children may be the result of limited cognitive capacity, which -- unless an extemal spatial array is available -- constrains the construction of an internal spatial array.