Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

According to mental model theory, spatial reasoning is basedon the construction and variation of mental modelsrepresenting spatial arrangements. Several effects in humanspatial reasoning are known to support this theory, forexample the ordering effect. Yet, reasoning effects have beenobserved for which the cognitive mechanisms are not entirelyexplained. To investigate how these effects can be attributedto neural computation, we modeled spatial reasoning in theNeural Engineering Framework.We selected three experiments to simulate tasks in a cognitivemodel based on an internal display. In our model,performance declines with an increase of objects which isexplained by the neural drift over time. We replicated effectsfrom the studies which we have found to be due to continuouspremise integration. By modeling and simulating spatialreasoning tasks, we showed that effects reported inpsychological studies can be explained by the emergentproperties of neural computation.