Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theories of discourse comprehension and memory for text usually assume a propositional format in which information is stored. In agreement with the work on mentla imagery we argue that information from textes may also be remembered in a spatial representation. Inference processes with spatial relations depend on the format of the mental representation. In two experiments we employed a priming technique to show spatial properties of mental representation. The first one using narratives failed to yield positive results. Th esecond experiment using spatial descriptions supported the hypothesis. Decision times in a priming task were dependent on spatial distances. The relationship between inference processes and the form of the mental representation is discussed.