PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

It has been recently claimed (Yuan, Uttal & Franconeri, 2016) that the processing of a spatial description such as “The key is on the table” requires people to shift their attention between the table (the reference object) and the key (located object). An alternative framework indicates that the location of the objects is stored via the spatial indexing process (Pylyshyn, 1989) and people should be able to extract the spatial relation from the spatial representation built from the scene. Accordingly, this process might occur without shifting the attention between the objects. In two eye tracking experiments we investigate whether people can spatial index a pair of briefly presented objects and process a spatial relation without the need to shift their attention directly on or between the stimuli. Preliminary data analysis suggests that spatial relations can be extracted without an attentional shift between the objects but relying only on the mental representation of the scene.