Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When people encode a representation of a scene, they do not necessarily represent the exact locations and orientationsof the constituent elements. Instead, people rely on preexisting inductive biases to simplify their encoding of new sceneconfigurations. We investigated people’s inductive biases in their memory for configurations of simple 2D shapes (such ascircles, triangles, etc.) using a serial reproduction paradigm (Bartlett, 1932). This paradigm establishes an iterative process inwhich information is transmitted through a chain of people (like the ”telephone” game). In our experiment, we asked peopleto memorize configurations of simple shapes (which were either generated at random or by other participants) and then askedthem to reproduce those configurations. In analyzing the final generation of reproductions, we found that people have strongpreferences for the scale of individual shapes, as well as the alignment, distance, overlap, and relative rotation between pairs ofshapes.