Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Relations are key to everyday cognition, but research has suggested that reasoning about relations is more challenging than reasoning about objects. We propose that one source of the difficulty resides in encoding: relations are slower and more resource-intensive to encode than objects. Two experiments provide evidence for this claim. Participants completed two straightforward matching tasks: given a standard, they had to identify either a relational match from a nonmatch, or an object match from a nonmatch. The critical manipulation was how long the standard was presented (i.e., the time allowed for encoding). The results showed that as presentation duration diminished, accuracy for relational matching deteriorated steeply, while that for object matching was relatively unaffected. This supports the idea that relational encoding is more resource-intensive. This pattern held for both similarity (Experiment 1) and difference judgments (Experiment 2), suggesting that the underlying comparison process is the same. We discuss the implications of these findings.