A phone in a basket looks like a knife in a cup: The perception of abstract relations
The world contains not only objects and features, but also relations between them. When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations containment and support, which abstract away from the particular objects involved. How does the mind represent relations themselves, separately from the objects participating in them? Though abstraction of this sort is frequently studied within the domains of language and higher-level reasoning, here we show that abstract relations may also arise in automatic visual processing, by exploring a surprising perceptual “error” that such relations can produce. In four experiments, participants saw a stream of images containing different objects arranged in force- dynamic relations — e.g., a phone contained inside a basket, a marker resting on a garbage can, or a knife sitting inside a cup. Participants’ task was to respond to a single target image (e.g., phone-in- basket) within the stream of distractors. Surprisingly, even though participants completed this task quickly and accurately, they false-alarmed more often to images that matched the target’s relational category than to those that did not — even when such images involved completely different objects. In other words, when participants were searching for a phone in a basket, they were more likely to mistakenly respond to a knife in a cup than to a marker on a garbage can. Follow-up experiments using this “image confusion” paradigm ruled out strategic responding, and also controlled for various image features that may have been confounded with these relations. We suggest that relational properties are automatically extracted by the mind, and in ways that are abstract: We see relations themselves, beyond the identities of the objects participating in them.